


Ship Your Enemies Glitter (and Gold)

by Aja



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Skating, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bipolar Disorder, Carmen - Freeform, Ice Skating, Injury Recovery, M/M, Music, Performing Arts, Trauma, all your ice skating musical classics, angstception, but at least it's only in the beginning hopefully, figure skating AU, intense performing environments, really not joking about the angst, skating is political, undiagnosed mental illness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-04-07
Updated: 2016-01-01
Packaged: 2018-03-21 17:20:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 20,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3700688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aja/pseuds/Aja
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The only thing that hurts worse than losing a gold medal is knowing that what you want most is the guy who took it away from you. </p><p>In which Arthur is a Tragic Figure; Kristy Yamaguchi never had to deal with this shit; Brian Boitano would definitely not do any of this; Eames can't stop making everything political; injury takes time to recover from, but betrayal takes even longer; and figure skating might just save everyone after all.</p><p>Note: This is a work in progress; it is multi-chaptered; it will be updated and finished. :)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So I said I was absolutely not not not going to write an Arthur/Eames figure skating AU, and then I promptly wrote 13,000 words of an Arthur/Eames figure skating AU. Er.
> 
> Notes and warnings: This fic takes an extremely negative view of Cobb, and Mal has an undiagnosed mental illness in this fic which roughly corresponds to her canonical behavior. Some situations/descriptions of the performing arts may be uncomfortable for anyone who's lived through similar tough/intense training environments.
> 
> John Curry, I'm so sorry you died tragically only to have some asshole like me come along and turn your historic legacy into an excuse for Eames to fantasize about Arthur's long legs and elegance and three-piece suits. You should probably just not even bother reading this and just go watch [the 1976 Olympics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z79TMsYRnEc) instead. Or ["Brick House"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RtL68KBBhY), because let's face it, Eames is the spiritual heir to Kurt Browning. Except hopefully with more Olympic medals, sob.

  

                              My heart is in my  
pocket, it is Poems by Pierre Reverdy.

— Frank O Hara, “A Step Away from Them”

 

 

 

Arthur is three when he falls in love. His dad signs the family up for group lessons and carts the whole gaggle of them, three siblings and two parents and their aunt and Arthur’s two cousins, down to the local ice rink. 

Arthur is the first one to get his skates on, and for the rest of his life he will think that maybe that was the random chance that sealed his fate. Because while he waits for the others to get their shoes and join him, he finds his balance, staggers over to the edge of the rink, and watches the lone girl who’s already on the ice. 

She is gliding soundlessly over the surface with her eyes closed, one leg lifted, her arm outstretched and neck arched, like a kite angled toward the sun. The loose fabric of her tunic flutters in her wake like the tail. When she comes near his side of the rink, she lowers her leg, still angled behind her, and he hears the blade hiss as it scrapes on the ice.

Arthur decides then and there he doesn’t need to wait for the others. He pulls off his tiny guards and wobbles out onto the ice on his tiny skates, ignoring the instructor when she calls after him. He marches forward a few tiny steps before suddenly feeling his momentum pull him forward. He glides for one or two soaring seconds, feeling the unexpected cooling rush of air movement against his face and arms and wrists, as though he were flying, as though he were air himself.

It’s the most exhilarating thing he’s ever felt in his three years of existence—so exhilarating that when he overbalances and faceplants onto the ice in the next moment, all he does is laugh. The instructor rushes onto the ice, babbling and frantic, but he’s already pulling himself to his feet again by the time she makes it to him. He looks over at the girl, but she hasn’t even noticed. She’s doing a slow, tight spin, her left leg tucked behind her right, her left wrist spiraling toward the sky. She still has her eyes closed.

It’s his earliest memory, that image of her, the way he felt watching her and the way he felt the moment the ice began to pull him forward on his skates. He’s always been hazy on the rest of the lesson but his parents have never let him forget the way it proceeds: with Arthur out-skating everyone in their group in order to get the girl in the white tunic to pay attention to him. His father used to cling to Arthur’s obsession with her as his one hope that he had not raised a flaming queer for a son; but all Arthur cares about from this moment forward is owning the ice the way she does. 

After the third time Arthur has managed to shift from standing on one foot to standing on the other, even with the heavy skates, his father asks the instructor about private skating lessons. This quickly escalates into an argument over the age requirement. Private coaching starts at age five, and the school doesn’t make exceptions, not even for the young lady in the other corner of the rink, who’s been skating since she was old enough to walk. 

“Yes, it is very rare for a child his age to be able to walk onto the ice without falling, much less balance that well,” the instructor is saying, “But that doesn’t mean he’ll be able to handle the additional pressure of an isolated learning environment.”

Arthur’s father laughs. “Clearly you don’t know our Arthur,” he says.

Arthur is frustrated—he wants to keep skating. He stamps his blade against the ice impatiently and pushes away from them towards the rink’s smooth, inviting center, even though he’s been told to stay near the edge. 

The way his dad tells the story, the instructor glances over at Arthur in mid-sentence, does a double-take, and says, “Was that—is he doing cross-cuts?”

They agree to let Arthur into their private coaching sessions. More importantly, the girl across the rink finally opens her eyes. Her name is Mal. She’s five and she’s already skating competitively. Arthur wants to do that. Arthur wants to do everything she’s doing. Arthur wants to skate, and skate, and skate.

So he does.

 

 

 

Arthur is 16 when he wins gold at the U.S. juniors. It’s notable not because of the victory—it wasn’t a clean skate and he’s just lucky most of his real competition have prematurely started competing in the seniors—but because one of the first questions the reporter from Skate asks him is:

“There’s already talk about you facing off against Eames at Worlds next month. How do you think you’ll do?”

Arthur was expecting a question about taking gold after his long time friend, the great Mallorie Miles, et cetera. He had a whole sound byte prepared about how skating alongside her all these years has given him a competitive edge because they both challenged each other to train harder, go deeper into themselves to find their own skating styles, blah blah blah. Instead he blinks a little stupidly and thinks: 

_Who the fuck is Eames?_

At Worlds, he finds out.

 

 

The 2015 Junior Worlds competition will forever be one of the huge before/after turning points of Arthur’s life. After Arthur wins, Mal takes him out to dinner to celebrate and then springs a surprise guest on him: Dominick Cobb.

Arthur forgets to eat and spends most of the time staring across the table while Cobb and Mal make small talk and Cobb talks earnestly about how he can help them both take their skating to the next level.

“I’ll be honest, I wanted to sign Mal after nationals, but she said I had to see you skate first because she wasn’t going anywhere without you,” Cobb says. He’s so affable, so sincere. Arthur has known he’d need to level up before going into the senior division, and he’s been putting it off out of loyalty to his old coach, but this is beyond anything he could have expected. This is training at a private school in Vermont with an Olympic-sized stadium, financed by one of the wealthiest sponsors in skating, with an actual skating legend. 

It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, and Arthur says yes to everything, yes without another thought, yes while being bowled over by his good luck.

He never forgives himself.

 

 

Before, though, there is Eames.

They’re grouped together in the practice session, and Arthur tries, as he always does, to focus on his own warm-ups and not anyone else’s routines. But he can’t help stealing glances at Eames, who’s almost a whole handspan bigger than Arthur everywhere it counts. He’s got such terrible posture when he’s doing his warm-ups that Arthur can’t understand how on earth he wound up in an international competition. He’s bound to be packing plenty of muscle mass in those thighs, so maybe his jumps are solid, but he does his basic figures with such insouciance that Arthur has to look away in second-hand embarrassment. 

The only explanation Arthur has is that Eames, so he’s learned since that first interview, is apparently a YouTube sensation with an official channel followed by two million people. Arthur never watches competitors on YouTube because it’s a fast route to overanalyzation and self-doubt and Arthur already has more of that than he can handle on a good day. And YouTube popularity isn’t an indicator of success in competition—just look at Jason Brown. But if Eames is popular on the Internet then it explains why there’s so much buzz about his performance. Clearly he’s managed to snow a few judges along the way.

He’s not lucky enough to escape having to talk to the guy; Eames skates over to him after the first few routines have gone by and says, “You’re Arthur Lake, yeah? I just wanted to say I’m a huge fan.”

His tone throws Arthur. Skaters by trade are all politeness and passive-aggressiveness, but Arthur doesn’t think he’s ever heard one claim outright to be a fan of their biggest competitor the day before the competition. He looks askance at Eames, but Eames is smiling a lopsided smile and holding out a hand for Arthur to shake. Arthur notes distantly that when he straightens up they’re exactly the same height. He finally decides on answering, “Thanks,” in a tone of polite detachment, and Eames lowers his hand but doesn’t stop smiling.

“I thought the way you approached that ‘[Mad World](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8P3ddxLRgM)’ routine was really smart,” he says. “That song is all about elegance and minimalism, right? It was a really good choice because it highlighted how pristine your skating is.”

Arthur can’t help but frown. “Mad World” was his routine from the 2013–14 season, his first pick within the new rules that (thank all the gods of figure skating) finally allow skaters to use music with words. He’d struggled with the routine, placing sixth overall skating to it at last year’s Grand Prix. He hadn’t heard about Eames at all last year, which means he was still fighting to make it onto the UK platform. 

But if Eames has actually watched Arthur’s “Mad World” routine and isn’t just talking out of his arse, it means he’s actually taken an interest, because Arthur is pretty sure that routine isn’t exactly at the top of the YouTube results for his name.

He opens his mouth to reply, something else vaguely polite, but then Eames adds, “And of course skating to Lambert is quite gutsy. It’s good to see skaters willing to go there. We need more.”

Arthur scowls. “It’s just a song,” he says. They’ve been working their way around the edge of the rink but now he stops and leans against the wall, indulging in a lifelong habit of digging his toe pick into the ice in irritation.

Eames looks startled. “My apologies,” he says. “I shouldn’t have assumed.”

Arthur feels his face redden. “You’re not wrong,” he says, aware he sounds offended. “But I’m not—my skating isn’t _political._ ”

At this Eames shifts, and suddenly the friendly smile is a smirk. He quirks an eyebrow. “Isn’t it?” he asks.

Arthur shoves off the wall. “I’m up,” he says curtly, and doesn’t bother to check if Eames is watching when he lands his first triple.

Arthur is a couple of spots ahead of Eames in the short program, so he doesn’t see Eames’ routine, but heading into the long program, Arthur is in 1st place and Eames is in 3rd, which means he gets to see all of his competition skate ahead of him, a steady parade of pressure. During the warm-ups in between routines, most of the skaters are friendly, talkative, but Eames, he notices, is like himself, uncommunicative and focused. 

Arthur wouldn’t have noticed him at all, except that Eames is clad in, god help the sport, _red vinyl pants._ His tunic is black with a shameless, plunging V-front that announces to all comers that he’s vying to become the heir to Plushenko. It also allows the edge of one tattooed pectoral to peek through. 

He looks ridiculous, but his expression is so concentrated and still when he finally takes the ice for his free skate that Arthur sits up a little straighter in the gallery. He’s heard Eames is doing _Carmen_ , so he’s braced himself for his ten thousandth hearing of the overture or the habanera, both of which barely register to him as music anymore so much as a familiar succession of jump points. For god’s sake, the ISU changed the rules to get _away_ from fucking Bizet, and yet here it is again.

But when the music starts, it’s not what he expected at all. The number [opens](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vbCk4rArJg&t=50) with a long jazz drum solo, and Eames hurls himself immediately into a triple axel against a climactic backdrop of cymbals as though he’s skating the finale of the number instead of the opening—it would be ridiculous if Eames weren’t all power and muscle, a wild streak across the ice to match the music. The jump is perfect, with so much height on the spins that before he lands Arthur’s heart is in his throat. A moment later the routine settles into the familiar sound of the Gypsy Song—but sung by a soulful vintage jazz singer in English:

_I’ll tell you why I want to dance_  
_It ain’t the sweetness in the music_  
_I like the sweetness in the music_  
_But that ain’t why I want to dance_

Eames is sinewy and deceptively graceless, as if he’s slunk onto the ice and has no idea how he found himself in a professional competition when he just wants to dance and pull off spectacular wild leaps and perfectly executed spins. At one point he leads with his torso, like a doll being jerked along by the music without his conscious control. His footwork is choreographed to seem deliberately careless, like the afterthought of an amateur whose primary motivation is to have fun and enjoy the spirit of the music; but Arthur doesn’t miss how much power there is in his rockers and pulls, or how much strength there is in his broad shoulders as he checks them before each twizzle.

_I feel it beatin’ in my heart_  
_And then I get a kind o’ dream_  
_And in my dream it kinda seem_  
_There’s one big heart in all the world_  
_There ain’t but one big heart in all the world_

When Eames gets to the line about a single heart for all the world, the music slows down, and he trips across the ice and falls to his knees, sliding toward the judges with his arms extended and a shameless grin on his face. It’s classic, vaudevillian, and the audience loves it. Their cheers seem to propel him up and on into the final third of the dance—Arthur realizes with a shock he’s actually thinking of it as a dance even though Eames has already executed all but a few of the technical elements of the program. 

Unlike every other skater he knows, Arthur doesn’t actually hate the code of points. The more skaters are judged on their technical elements, the more precision skaters like him thrive and flourish. But like every other skater living under the points system, his eternal struggle is finding choreography that comes alive on the ice even within the rigid confines of the program requirements. 

Yet in this routine, Eames has somehow managed to make all of the actual requirements seem like accidents, while everything else—the hammy choreography, the slips and slides across the ice, the stuttering toe jumps—is what he really came here for. It’s one of the best routines Arthur has ever seen. 

The music builds to another tumultuous climax while Eames does a final series of sweeping crossovers, his hips like pistons on every thrust. The audience is on their feet before he even hits his final spin, and Arthur doesn’t blame them. His throat is dry. He doesn’t look at Eames when he comes triumphantly off the ice into the kiss-and-cry, though he can sense Eames glancing over at him.

The sweepers have to make three rounds across the ice to grab all of the roses and stuffed animals the audience have showered down upon Eames. Arthur digs out his phone while they clear the rink and googles the music. It’s from something called _Carmen Jones_ , which Wiki informs him is an all-black musical version of _Carmen_ with lyrics by Oscar fucking Hammerstein. 

Eames’ performance, Arthur realizes, wasn’t just a tongue-in-cheek sendup of the figure skating establishment—it was a savvy callout of its aesthetics, its whiteness, and probably its homophobia. Judging from their brief conversation about Adam Lambert, Eames wouldn’t have picked a song from a musical unless he wanted to send a message. Christ, Arthur thinks. He’s not trying to be Plushenko, he’s trying to be Johnny Weir by way of Kurt Browning. Arthur feels his face heating up and doesn’t know whether it’s in admiration or indignation or jealousy or everything at once.

Eames’ score is high enough to put him in first place, but it’s predictably higher in artistic marks than technical. Arthur’s coach, Martina, pats him on the arm and says, “Lots of skaters have style. Not many have substance. You have both. Go show them.”

It’s true. Arthur gets to his feet, stretches, and takes the ice, where he proceeds to blow Eames’ score out of the water and become the youngest World Junior Champion since Nam Ngyuen. And, okay, Nam Ngyuen only became champion a year ago, and 16 isn’t exactly young these days. 

But the important thing is that he beats Eames, Eames with his Internet fame and crowd-pleasing moves and massive thighs and broad shoulders and high-altitude jumps. 

Because Eames may have style, but Arthur? Arthur has technique. Arthur has finesse. Arthur has precision. Arthur has flawless jumps and effortless flow. Arthur’s footwork is a judge’s dream. And he’s lucky enough to have a routine that does half the work for him—a [suite](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwGxqSlH20A&index=6&list=PLJ4encsixJEIbaQFkYxzpCOKyr9Vlza7E) [from](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlIQYaeY0lM) the [Skyfall](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_dwx2J_WK8) soundtrack that lets him enact his personal fantasy of being a hired assassin while still fulfilling Arthur’s personal cardinal rule of skating: No fucking _Carmen_ , no fucking _Phantom_ , no fucking Morricone, no fucking _Scheherazade_ , no fucking Tchaikovsky, and absolutely no fucking Nino fucking Rota.

Eames may have red leather and sex appeal on his side, but Arthur can pull off a goddamn triple axel while skating in a three-piece suit and do it with absolute precision. 

Substance over style. Nothing to prove except that he’s here to skate. Rock beats paper. Every time.

He ignores Eames until they’re on the podium together, until Eames leans over and whispers, “This was fun, yeah?” into his ear over the sound of applause. “See you next time, Arthur.”

 

 

Except then, next season, Arthur finally goes senior, along with everyone else at his level, and he loses. 

And loses. 

He ekes out silver at the U.S. nationals, which isn’t too shabby at all for his first major competition as a senior competitor. But something is off. 

It takes him far, far too long to realize what it is, and by then it’s too late.

Cobb is the hardest coach he and Mal have ever worked with, but that’s only to be expected given how top-level Cobb is. Plus, he’s protective: when Mal falls in practice one day he refuses to let her back on the ice for a week to give her knee full time to heal. 

“He’s punishing me for landing on the flat of the blade,” Mal tells Arthur angrily during her week off. 

“You’re being paranoid,” Arthur says. “You know he’s just trying to make sure you don’t skate injured. He’s got Saito’s doctor checking on you every day.”

Mal shakes her head. “You’re not with him one-on-one as much as I am,” she says him. “You don’t see when he’s cruel. How his kindnesses are conditional.”

“He just wants us to win,” Arthur says, rubbing her back. She looks at him and smiles. 

“And so we shall,” she says, slipping her arm around him and leaning against his shoulder.

At 18, Mal has already won an Olympic medal and a Grand Prix championship. She’s the U.S. ladies’ national champion in the senior division, two years running. At their old training complex, under Martina, Mal pretty much had her way whenever she wanted—and she often wanted. She’s chafing under Cobb’s regimen and attention to detail. They both are. Arthur had promised Martina he’d keep his temper. 

“Listen and do what he says first, then ask questions,” she’d told him when he broke the news that he and Mal were both leaving to train with Cobb. “Don’t be impudent. Don’t be rude. He’s one of the best, you know.”

“So are you,” Arthur had told her, and meant it. He’d trained with her since he was thirteen, because that was when Mal had started training with her, and wherever Mal went Arthur went. They had climbed their way up from the obscurity of their local skating rink together, competition by competition. When Mal was 12, her parents had tried to cut back on the amount of time she spent at the rink, exhausted by the constant commute and travel and worried that Mal was exhausting herself. When they refused to pay her entry fee for the regional qualifying competition for nationals, Arthur sold his entire video game collection along with the skateboard he’d gotten for Christmas and paid it for her. After he’d convinced his parents to give her rides to a few of the competitions, it only made sense to invite her to live with them permanently so she could be closer to the rink. After a tense night of discussion between her parents and his, they had agreed, and after that Arthur hadn’t seen them much. 

Mal had always been close-mouthed about her family and he suspected it had been a mutual parting of ways. Her mother had come to a few of her national competitions, but her stepfather, a local community college professor, was always working. It was selfish of Arthur not to care more about them, he knew, but it was honestly all fine with him. Mal was his sister in every way but blood. They already competed together, trained together, even went on a few disastrous double dates together in junior high. So it only made sense that they should live together, too.

Arthur knows Mal better than anyone. He knows that when she’s having a bad day and she starts muttering in French, she’s actually quoting Baudelaire, because she decided when she was nine that Baudelaire was the only thing that could reach her when she went into what she described as her “maladie sombre.” He knows her biggest weakness is a tendency to maneuver from the flat of the blade instead of on the edge, which is why even though the swing choctaw is her favorite skating element, it’s hard for her to compete with. 

He knows she once quit skating when she was fourteen, after she had a disastrous regional. It was actually one of Arthur’s best skates up til then; he’d gotten gold in his category, the first time he’d ever finished ahead of her in a competition. But Mal’s skating had been off, lackluster; she’d landed all her jumps but her movements were clunky, and she’d only placed fourth overall. Arthur remembers she hadn’t cried or reacted in any way other than to stare grimly at the podium, her lips tight and her hands clenched around her skates, palms digging into the blades until he worried she would hurt herself.

For the next two weeks she’d refused to attend practice. She’d gone off her diet, refused to work out, gone to the movies, eaten junk food, stayed up too late. Arthur knows she did worse things, too, during those two weeks; but she refused to talk about them when he asked. 

He’d gone to practice every day, feeling a cold knot in the pit of his stomach every day she didn’t show up. He was mad at her, really angry at her for the first time in his life—mad at her for being so selfish and so self-destructive without just being happy for Arthur for once. 

But mostly he just felt lost without her. 

On Friday of the second week, she’d showed up during mid-afternoon, her skates around her neck, looking defiant but hopeful. Her coach had kicked her off their team instead, and Arthur had followed, because where Mal went, Arthur went. But then Martina had taken them under her wing, and she had saved Mal. Under her guidance, Mal had unfurled into the best skater in the country. 

And that’s what she’s been, ever since. 

“Be gentle with Mal,” Arthur tries to tell Cobb one day. “I know she can come off as highstrung but that’s just her way of trying to hide how much she wants you to encourage her.”

Cobb snorts. “She’s not a colt, Arthur. She can take real coaching. God knows it’s about time she had some. And speaking of encouragement, why don’t I encourage you to get out there and go over that salchow combo again?”

So Arthur works, and works, and trains harder than he ever has in his life. Entering the senior level means competing all over the world, which means when he’s not training he’s traveling. Cobb’s training complex is sponsored by Proclus Global because Cobb is friends with the CEO, which means that for the first time in Arthur’s life he’s able to fund the expense of skating without the added pressure of knowing he’ll be putting his family into debt unless he wins at competitions. Juniors usually involve more competitions and more skating opportunities, but the first three months of the 2015/2016 season, Arthur travels more and competes against more world-class skaters than ever. It’s exhilarating and terrifying and Arthur’s never felt so out of his depth. 

“Was it like this for you the first year you leveled up?” he asks Mal one night, the two of them jet-lagged and sleep-deprived and more or less passed out on a hotel bed together in Singapore.

“Like what, _mon petit prince_?” Mal asks around a yawn. She recently cut her hair into a loose bob to enhance the effect of the ‘20s chanteuse look she has going for her latest Piaf routine. Her bronze curls make a halo around her head where she rests against the pillow, and she looks more fragile, more wan than he’s used to seeing her.

He tries to put it into words. “This feeling—this feeling that never goes away that you’re just...not good enough,” he says finally. It comes out sounding hollow and scared, and he immediately hates himself. What a giant baby he is.

Mal hums. “I was always excited,” she says. “It’s only lately that I’ve felt—well.” She closes her eyes. “You’ve never been confident, Arthur. You should be.” She finds his wrist even with her eyes closed and she wraps her fingers around it. “You’re a wonderful skater. You belong on the ice with the best of them.”

Usually around September he feels his routine settle into his bones, but all that year he stays on edge. He skates clean for the most part but his performances feel more erratic than he’s used to. He thinks at first that it’s because he’s nervous, more intimidated competing against more experienced skaters who’ve been in the seniors for a while. But then he watches Eames skate, Eames who’s taken to seniors like it’s where he belonged all along, Eames who medals in his first upper-level performance. Arthur may have visited his YouTube channel a few times since they were on the podium together, still unable to tell whether what he feels watching Eames do freaking pirouettes across the ice is jealousy or exasperation.

At the Cup of Russia two months later, Eames winks at him in the practice session and Arthur promptly slips and falls on his ass. He writes it off as a fluke.

Arthur keeps waiting for Cobb to give him a talk about keeping his focus, about getting his head in the competition, maybe even about picking a more flexible routine, something, anything. Instead, week after week, performance after performance, Cobb nods like Arthur’s delivered a good showing, slaps him on the back, and says, “Good work.” He sees Cobb talking performances over with Mal, though, his face close to hers, intense and focused. Gradually it dawns on Arthur that it’s not that Cobb thinks Arthur’s performances are better than they are. It’s that he just doesn’t _care_ about Arthur’s performances one way or the other. Either because he thinks lackluster is all Arthur’s capable of or because he only agreed to take on Arthur so he could get Mal, Cobb’s only focus is on Mal.

Fine, Arthur thinks. He’ll work harder. He’s made people sit up and take notice before. He can do it again.

For a long time, Arthur thinks his strategy’s working. He edges up in the international rankings. He goes head to head against Eames in the NHK Trophy and actually gets an ovation for his short skate in competition, to a sleek movie theme by Loussier called “[The Mercenaries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4YTAncGuSs)” that he chose because it’s understated and low-key and sneaky; it lets him alternately tiptoe like a cat burglar and flow across the ice the way he loves most. 

“That was marvelous,” Eames says when he comes off the ice, and Arthur frowns before he can help himself. Eames has already skated, so he should be either in the locker room or in the audience. Instead he’s standing near the boards. Arthur wonders if he’d been there for Arthur’s whole skate. 

Eames says, “Good job, mate,” and holds out his hand for Arthur to shake. Arthur takes it limply. “I wish we could all pull off choreography like that. You do your own, right?” 

He knows on some level Eames is just trying to be nice. Still, “nice” isn’t something he’s used to, not in this environment; and the stress and rancor he’s been holding on to all burst out of him in one single, solitary moment of pettiness. He answers, “Yeah, I do, but. Well.” He glances dismissively down over Eames’ muscular physique. “Some of us just don’t have the lines for it.”

Eames’ smile fades. He drops Arthur’s hand. “Quite,” he says, and the sudden coolness in his voice makes Arthur feel worse, somehow, than he’s felt all year.

“Fuck,” he says. “Sorry. Sorry, that was shitty of me. I didn’t mean—” he halts, unsure what he _did_ mean. He could just return the compliment, tell Eames he’s amazing, that he’s been watching him skate for months, ever since last season, and it never gets boring; but the words stick in his throat, as if even the act of admitting that another skater is good would be enough to hand them the entire competition.

Eames only looks at him, gaze steady, his expression giving nothing away. Before Arthur can make an even bigger ass of himself, Cobb comes along and slaps him on the back and jovially drags Arthur away.

Eames gets his own back when Arthur falls in the free program and only takes fourth place overall. They both lose to the Russians, but Eames skates to a [freaking _Ladytron_ remix](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oItYRJCZTwU) wearing all black sequins with robot-like choreography, and he brings the house down. There’s so much crap on the ice after he’s done you can’t even _see_ the ice. Arthur thinks maybe he’ll stay down in the tunnel and tell Eames he did a good job, but when it’s over he finds himself turning away, red-faced and angry at himself for blowing his lead.

Predictably, Cobb only tells him he did well.

Frustrated, Arthur describes to scrap and rework his entire free program before Worlds. It’s additional stress and endless hours of learning new music, re-inscribing choreography onto his tired body, but it’s clear what he’s doing isn’t working. Cobb just lets him do it, and Arthur thinks that maybe that’s just how Cobb is. 

Then he gets to practice late one day—he’d driven back home to Boston for the weekend for a family thing and gotten in behind schedule—and walks in to find Cobb tearing into Mal. He’s actually _screaming_ at her, his face red and livid, Mal holding back tears and standing rigid, with her head hung down and her arms crossed. She’s digging her fingernails into her forearms. Arthur can see them leaving deep red marks against her skin even from a distance.

Arthur runs for the ice, still wearing his pedestrian sneakers. Cobb’s got his finger in Mal’s face by the time Arthur reaches them. “You represent this entire school when you’re on the ice,” he’s yelling. “I _will not_ have you dragging my reputation and the reputation of everyone you skate with into the mud just because you’re too much of a lazy cow to delay your rotation!”

“Hey!” Arthur says, shouldering in between the two of them. He presses back instinctively against Mal, pulling her hand away from her clenched forearm and grasping it. “That’s it, we’re done. Come on, Mal.” He tugs her with him towards the changing room. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” Cobb asks. He almost sounds amused, and Arthur reminds himself that punching a coach is the fastest way to an ISU suspension.

“We’re done,” Arthur says. “We quit.”

Mal freezes, going rigid and unmoving. He turns back, startled.

“Arthur,” she says. “Don’t be silly, we can’t quit.”

“Yeah, we can,” Arthur says, cold filling him up. “He doesn’t get to talk to you that way, not now, not ever.”

“Arthur.” Mal jerks her hand away. Now she looks embarrassed on top of upset. Arthur doesn’t understand what’s happening. “It’s fine. He’s right, I was pulling my arms in too soon on the axels. I’m sorry, Dom.”

Arthur glances at Cobb, who’s plastered a shit-eating grin on his face and taken Mal’s other hand. As Arthur watches, he pats it. “Attagirl,” he says. “Now get back on the ice and do what you were born to do.” 

Mal nods. She sends Arthur one pleading glance and then heads towards the center of the rink. Arthur watches her, still feeling like the bottom is dropping out of his stomach. 

“As for you,” Cobb says, turning towards him with an unfriendly smile. “Don’t ever do that again. You wanna quit, be my guest, but don’t undermine my coaching, okay? We clear?”

Arthur stares back at him. “You lose me, you lose her,” he says. “Are you ready to deal with the fallout of what we might have to say about your _coaching_ after we leave?”

Cobb snorts. “You don’t know your girl at all, do you?”

“I know she’s not my girl,” Arthur sneers.

“Maybe you should act like it and let her make her own decisions,” Cobb says. “Go get changed and work on your turns. Christ, if compulsory figures were still a requirement neither one of you would ever be on a podium.”

 

 

Mal balks. No, she isn’t going to quit. No, she isn’t going to let Arthur quit. No, she wouldn’t quit if Arthur did, and doesn’t he know they’ve come too far to give up just because they finally have a coach who doesn’t coddle them?

Arthur tries to tell her she’s wrong, but she clams up and refuses to talk about it, and Arthur refuses to go anywhere without her. He keeps an eye on her as the months pass, watches her grow paler and more wan. Some nights she refuses to leave the ice until hours after she should have stopped practicing, so Arthur stays, too, sitting on the bleachers and trying to ignore the ever-growing feeling in the pit of his stomach that something is terribly wrong. In desperation, he calls Martina, who sighs and tells him that there’s only so much she can do. “Your best path is to leave and find a new coach,” she says. “I say that for both of you. Your skating has declined this year, too, Arthur. You’re not yourself.” 

Arthur holds back a laugh. It’s awful, he thinks, how hearing someone else say it after all this time is almost a relief. It means someone else has noticed. Abruptly he feels like crying.

“If I leave she’ll stay,” he says. “You have to talk to her.”

But Martina’s conversation only leaves Mal furious at Arthur for interfering. “I don’t need you trying to pull some kind of intervention on me while my back is turned, Arthur!” she seethes. “I don’t need the pressure right before a major competition! Don’t you ever think of how _I_ feel?”

“That’s all I _ever_ think of,” Arthur says, stung. “Or do all the times I followed you into competitions, trained with you, paid entry fees for you, got my parents to let you _live with us_ —do those not count?”

Mal blanches and instantly looks guilty, and suddenly she looks so tired and sad that Arthur blurts out, “Jesus, Mal, what’s happened to you?” before he can help himself.

“I’m fine,” Mal says. “I just need to work harder.”

“Have you even eaten today?” Arthur says, and as he says it he realizes he hasn’t seen her eat today, not in a while.

She gives him a wan smile. “Yes, dad, I had some energy bars for breakfast.”

“Those aren’t—”

“Shh,” she says. “Arthur, please, just. Just let me get through Worlds, okay? Just let’s make it through Worlds and show everyone how amazing we are and then we’ll talk about what to do next.”

“You promise,” Arthur says. “Mal, promise me.”

“I promise,” Mal says.

 

 

The 2016 Worlds are being held in Boston so his whole family is there for his short skate. Even Mal’s family comes. Being back home feels more surreal than Arthur would have expected. A few of his friends from high school, from before he’d left for Vermont and basically gotten home-schooled, offer to take him out and get him wasted, and Arthur wonders who these people even are. It’s a strange, unpleasant thing. Downtown feels smaller than he remembers. His own bedroom is smaller than he remembers. The only thing that feels normal is the ice.

At Worlds Arthur skates his fucking heart out. He tells himself that this is the hurdle, that once he and Mal are done with this competition and have proven that they can skate under Cobb’s watch, the two of them can go anywhere they want to go. No one has ever doubted Mal, but Arthur feels all the pressure of being the underdog going into the competition, feels it pressing on his shoulders right up until the moment he takes the ice for his free skate.

When he decided to rework his long program, he also decided to break his own cardinal rule. He’s skating to a Morricone number, “The Crisis,” purely and solely because he’s been in love with it ever since he saw Daisuke Takahashi use it as his [2012 exhibition number](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvNSdSA22l8). Cobb thinks the piece is too understated and confusing for an audience and too quiet for the judges, but Mal has been begging Arthur to skate to it ever since she saw the look on his face after they watched Takahashi’s performance together. So that settled it, really.

Arthur loves “The Crisis,” how it manages to be gentle and sad, full of yearning and hope but so much dissonance all at once. He loves how it cloaks itself over him, drawing itself out in smooth lines, begging him to turn his body into a pulse that ebbs and flows as he skates. 

He knows it’s a huge risk, debuting the routine at Worlds without knowing how the audience will react. But sometimes, as Mal would say, you have to take a chance to make a chance.

Arthur doesn’t have much hope that the song will reach the crowd in the same way it touches him—the quiet songs almost never do—but when he’s on the ice and the soft piano starts to echo over the rink, something settles within him, and he lets go.

He skates the opening lines of the song with his eyes closed. By the time he opens them again he can tell from the harsh sizzle of silence in between the notes of music that he has the audience where he needs them to be. The hush that’s fallen over the rink is intoxicating, and he leans into it, throwing in an early unrehearsed choctaw just to emphasize the bend and sway of the strings as they begin the second verse and layer over the piano. He’s dimly aware that when he lands his first triple, there’s only the lightest smattering of applause, as if the audience is too spellbound to break the lull with noise. But he doesn’t have time to focus on that; the music is pulling him forward.

He lands every jump. His footwork is flawless. He does a planned tiptoe step to homage Takahashi’s own choreography, and then adds in a heartbeat gesture, a subtle nod to Eames’ vaudevillian number from last season. And then he dips his head for his final camel spin, letting the energy build and spiral and slowly flutter out of him with the last dying notes of the music.

When he finally stops there is absolute silence for a long moment, and then the audience erupts.

Arthur blinks, a few times. The stadium is on its feet and emitting a solid roar of noise. Arthur has heard this level of noise for Mal before, but never for himself. It takes him a few moments of stunned delayed reaction to realize that it’s all for him. For _his skating._

Dazed, he waves and picks up the first bouquet he comes to. The applause keeps coming, and coming. Arthur isn’t quite sure what just happened, but he stays on the ice, blowing an unsteady kiss to the crowd. The flowers and stuffed animals are _still_ getting tossed onto the rink. Arthur picks up a giant teddy bear and waves its paw appreciatively at the audience, which cheers even harder. After blowing them another kiss, Arthur heads off the ice. His legs, he realizes abruptly, are shaking.

Cobb is there to greet him with a smile and a backslap, and suddenly it feels so wrong to have him there, to have anyone but Martina and Mal there, that Arthur bites out, “Don’t touch me,” as he enters the kiss-and-cry. He doesn’t know where Mal is, but since the ladies' free skate is tomorrow after the pairs finals, he assumes she’s practicing. For years, if they were in the same competition, they’d always be in the audience to watch each other skate, but those days are long gone. She’s been focused so much on her performance all week that Arthur can’t blame her for missing his. He can tell her about it later. He clamps down on a feeling that threatens to become hurt and shoves it out of reach.

Before he sits down, he sees Eames in the waiting area. The sight startles him, because he’d honestly forgotten all about the competition. Eames is ranked second after the short program to Arthur’s third. He’ll be skating next. 

Eames’ eyes are fastened to Arthur’s face, and Arthur goes over to him before he can help himself.

“Arthur,” says Eames. His voice is low and gravelly and full of soft admiration, and Arthur wonders if he noticed the move Arthur put in the choreography just for him. He hadn’t even realized until tonight that it _was_ a homage to Eames, but now it’s so obvious he thinks Eames must have known before he did. 

They stare at each other.

“You’d best go receive your perfect scores,” Eames says at last. He’s smiling, but it’s a faint smile, tinged with a touch of something distant, something rueful and jealous, and Arthur realizes with shock that Eames looks the way Arthur has felt all season whenever he watches Eames skate.

He swallows. “Thank you,” he manages to get out. Immediately he reddens, feeling appalled at how tight-voiced he sounds. But Eames’ expression clears a bit. And Arthur makes himself try one more time to say something kind, something sincere. Surely, he thinks, if there’s any moment he can afford to be gracious, it’s this one.

“I... I look forward to watching you skate,” he says. Still awkward, still halting, but maybe Eames can tell that he means it. 

Eames’ mouth turns up wryly at the edge. “Thank you, Arthur,” he says, with the faintest touch of amusement. 

Great, Arthur thinks. Now he just thinks I’m being condescending. 

“I look forward to making it worth your while,” Eames adds, with a hint of challenge.

“You do,” Arthur blurts. “I mean. You always do.”

Eames blinks. And before Arthur can say anything else he hears his name being called for scores. He starts and scurries over to the bench, waving belatedly to the audience, who’s still cheering.

His scores aren’t perfect. They are, however, very, very high—his highest ever at the senior level. Enough to overtake first place with just two skaters to go, with a considerable lead; enough so that Cobb, sitting next to him but dutifully not touching Arthur, clenches his fist and hisses, “Yes,” under his breath. Arthur’s sis texts him a selfie of her and his mom and dad, who he can see sitting near the boards, shooting him thumbs up and wearing giant grins.

Arthur, overwhelmed, clutches the enormous bear to his chest and waves to the screaming audience. 

And then, of course, it’s Eames’ turn. Since all the other skaters have skated save Eames and the final contestant, a Chinese skater named Guang Zhi whose jumps are intimidatingly high, the practice session is short. Arthur leaves the kiss-and-cry but stands by the boards as the rink clears. Eames shoots him a glance as he takes the ice, and Arthur sends him a nod that he hopes translates to ‘good luck’ and not ‘I hope you fall and break your pelvis.’ Eames is still wearing the wry smile he favored Arthur with earlier, but as he glides onto the ice Arthur watches it fade into that now-familiar look of intense concentration.

In Arthur’s defense, they will talk about this competition later as one for the history books. They will point to Arthur Lake's performance as the one to beat, the one that demonstrates that men's figure skating isn't dead. They'll say that Lake's performance was the moment a new era of skating began, the moment the future tipped its hat to the past and then skated on by.

But Eames.

Eames, who hadn't needed to rework his routine halfway through the season, has only gotten stronger in the months since Arthur saw him skate in Japan. He already knows the audience, many of whom have been watching him skate this routine for months, will love the dance. All he has to do is nail it.

He doesn’t just nail it. He kills it.

Arthur knows this routine is impressive, but Eames has added in a few choreographic flourishes, and he’s clearly been working on the footwork. The robot/android/whatever theme of the dance is more pronounced, his movements more precise and dramatic. The Plushenko comparison has always been handy for Eames because of his build and his showmanship, but despite his first impression Arthur’s never really agreed with that assessment—Eames’ theatrics, he thinks, are tied more closely to his choreography than to his personality. But now, for the first time in a long time, he can see it. Maybe it’s the way Eames is working the sex appeal for this performance—he’s ditched the sequins and opted instead for a sleek black military look with the uniform shirt completely unbuttoned. Arthur is acutely reminded that while he joined this sport because he loved skating, it has a few other perks as well.

Arthur’s always felt privately that while Eames’ Ladytron mix is a good one for the ice, the music flags halfway through. Like his own routine, it’s a deliberately repetitive one, which means the choreography has to do the extra work of building tension and layering over the music. Or so Arthur is thinking when Eames hits the last section of the chorus and instead of leveling up with choreography, he suddenly switches on LED lights that outline his entire costume, complete with a pair of fucking _[Glo Blades](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJxWnZb9AtE)_ , what the _hell_. Behind him, Arthur hears Cobb saying, “The fuck? That shit’s not regulation. What the fuck?” but Arthur is entranced. The lights make Eames’ outfit look like something straight out of _Blade Runner_. It looks amazing. Regulation or not, it looks like the future—like something that will put figure skating back on the front page of the newspaper, and maybe even warrant a Buzzfeed list (Top 23 flashiest skating routines, Arthur thinks with chagrin, with Eames ranked in the all-time number two slot, right behind “[Brick House](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RtL68KBBhY).”) The judges won’t vote to penalize Eames for it any more than they voted to penalize skaters who used music with words over the past few years before they made the change official.

And anyway, Arthur thinks, he still has his choreography working in his favor. Eames has been using some prodigy choreographer who was in ballet before he brought her over into the sport, and she’s good, really good. But all told this isn’t really Arthur’s favorite routine of Eames—it relies too much on footwork, which has never been Eames’ core strength, and it doesn’t showcase his phenomenal ease with spins, nor his ability to increase the difficulty of his spins. 

But no sooner has he thought this than Eames comes off a camel spin, switches position, and then does a fucking _Biellmann_. The audience loses its collective mind, and so does Arthur. “Fuck,” he says out loud. Since when has Eames had this much flexibility? Since when has _any_ male skater? 

“Fuck,” he says again, and as Eames goes into his final flying spin, Arthur’s hit with a wave of emotion so fierce he has to grip the boards to steady himself.

The only thing that hurts worse than knowing that he’s just lost his chance at taking a gold medal at Worlds, in his hometown, in front of his whole family, is the realization that what he wants most is the guy who took it away from him.

Arthur takes silver after Zhi falls and two-foots one of his landings. It’s bad luck, but Arthur thinks it probably would have happened to anyone who had to skate after Eames.

On the podium, Eames says, “You’re coming out tonight, right? A bunch of the skaters are going out to the wharf after this. You should come.”

Arthur looks at him. Up close Eames’ lips are always redder, his eyes always greener, than Arthur remembers them. He thinks about going, about having a few drinks, about getting Eames alone and letting his hands wander, just enough to send a message, to get an invitation back to Eames’ hotel—on the off-chance Eames wouldn’t just be vaguely sardonic and mock Arthur for even trying to flirt. 

He thinks about it, anyway—about pressing Eames against the door once they’re inside Eames’ hotel room, about stripping off his clothes and getting his hands on that solid wall of muscle. He thinks about how Eames would kiss, heated and intense like everything else about him. 

And then he thinks about having to wake up and leave in the morning, about having to compete against him like nothing had happened between them. About watching Eames flirt with other skaters, watching him give each of them the fixed, concentrated look he’s giving Arthur now.

“I—my family’s here,” he says by way of excuse. “They’re taking me out somewhere.”

“Oh, that’s right,” says Eames. “You’re from Boston, yeah?” Arthur blinks, surprised. “Well, we’re just going to S&W to start, you can bring them along.”

He’s pretty sure his smile probably looks a bit grim. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says. It’s Eames’ turn to look startled. It’s not a pleasant feature on him.

“Right,” he says, and the cool note Arthur remembers from each of their previous exchanges is back in his voice. He turns away and stays silent while the three respective national anthems start to play, and Arthur can’t think of a thing to say that will wipe the vaguely displeased look off his face.

That night, Arthur’s family and Mal’s take them all out for dinner. It's the first time Arthur has really seen Mal with her family in years. She is quiet and pale, and as worried about her as Arthur is, he can't help noticing the way her family is silent and awkward around her. Her mother gives up after the first few halting attempts at conversation, content with shooting her daughter mystified glances over her wine, as if she wonders who this person is seated beside her. Arthur's family is loud enough for all of them, but blessedly none of them bring up the subject of Cobb or their training. He knows his family is worried about both of them, but he also knows he can trust them not to cause drama. Mal, sometimes, is more than enough drama for any party on her own; but tonight she's just tired and withdrawn. When she says she needs to turn in early it only makes sense--tomorrow's her free skate, after all--but the note of absence in her voice makes both Arthur and her mother send her sharp looks of worry. 

"I know you wanted to go out with your friends, Arthur," she tells him as they had back to the hotel. "Tomorrow, after it's all over, we'll celebrate. I promise."

The next day she falls apart. 

Arthur is in the audience with her family, because where else would he be? At first, when the familiar strains of "Non, Je ne regrette rien" begin, he thinks she's never seemed more in control. Her movements are smooth, masterful at first. And then she goes for her first triple axel and right away he knows she's not going to make it: her entrance is unsteady, her rotation too early, her balance off-center. She falls, hard, and the audience lets out a cry of sympathy. Beside him, her mother clenches her hands in her lap. 

Mal gets up, visibly shaken. She turns her next jump, a triple lutz, into a single, and then stumbles and two-foots the landing. By now the audience is tense, the atmosphere painful; when she rounds the curve of the rink Arthur sees she's crying. He dares a look over at Cobb standing by the boards, and sees him red-faced and scowling. On the ice, Mal stumbles over an easy Mohawk. 

"I'm going down there," he says to Mrs. Miles, squeezing her hand. "She'll be okay." Her mom nods tearfully, then gives him a brief hug. 

A smattering of applause as he makes his way to the skaters' entrance tells him she must have landed one of her jumps, but by the time he makes it to the boards she's totally lost her focus. Arthur knows her routine as well as his own and she's not skating it; instead she's gliding aimlessly around the ice, occasionally attempting a half-hearted spin or a footwork passage that wasn't even in her choreography. For an eerie moment Arthur thinks of Ophelia going mad in front of the entire court. At this rate she'll be lucky if she isn't disqualified for failing to complete any of the requirements. 

Arthur's stomach is stone. Cobb did this, he thinks, cold fury settling into his bones. He did this to her. He closes his eyes, blinking back tears and willing her to finish the routine. Instead, with at least a minute left to go, she suddenly stops skating, just glides to a halt in the middle of the rink. 

Then she simply skates off the ice. Arthur and the audience are stunned into silence. As she reaches the edge of the rink, the music shuts off abruptly, and Arthur sees Cobb storm over, grabbing her arm roughly, his scream audible over the entire shocked stadium.

Arthur doesn't think, just lunges between Mal and Cobb. Mal looks wrecked. Her gaze is unfocused, as if she hasn't even noticed them. He shoves Cobb away and takes her hand. For the first time in ages, she lets him. "Don't," he tells Cobb, meaning it more than he's ever meant anything. "Don't." From the way Cobb starts and backs away, Arthur guesses he got his point across. 

He leads her out of the stadium. "Let's just go, Arthur," she whispers when he starts to head for the locker room. "Please. Let's just go."

Arthur doesn't bother pointing out that her street clothes are in her bag, that she's not even wearing guards for her skates, or that neither of them are in the best condition to drive out of there at the moment. He just says yes, as he always says yes to Mal, and goes.

Since they're at home, Arthur's parents have been insisting on letting him borrow their SUV because it's the easiest way to get all of their costumes, his and Mal’s, to and from the hotel, and it makes his parents feel useful. It turns out to be lucky in this case because the media doesn't know they have a car parked on site. Arthur dodges cameras on his way out of the stadium tunnel, covering Mal with his jacket, and pretends to order a car service to throw them off track before heading to the parking garage. 

When Mal asks in a small voice if she can drive, he lets her, because when they were kids she used to take him driving on nights when she was upset or stressed after a bad performance. Sometimes they'd wind up standing under the moonlight in an open field out in the middle of nowhere; once they nearly ran out of gas after getting lost. But usually they just drove until she had calmed down. 

Arthur's phone has been vibrating nonstop in his pocket so he turns it off. Mal's is eerily silent. They get into the SUV and pull wordlessly onto the highway before Arthur dares speak. "It's not the end," he says finally. 

Mal laughs, a tiny ugly laugh. "I'm old, Arthur," she says. 

"What?" He starts and stares at her. "You're not old, what—"

"I'm already twenty," she says. "By the time Pyeongchang happens, I'll be 22. Even if i manage to make it on the team, Arthur, do you know how many women older than 21 have taken Olympic gold under the new point system?"

Arthur slowly shakes his head. 

"One," she says. "Just one. Shizuka Arakawa a decade ago. Before that, the last gold medalist over 21 was Katarina Witt." She laughs again. "I am no Katarina Witt."

"Stop that," Arthur says. "Mal." They're driving north toward the turnpike, and Arthur figures she must know where she's going, but doesn't know if he should ask. "I'm telling you, once we get away from Cobb we can put this whole year behind us."

"They'll never let you put it behind you," Mal says. "Isn't it a shame, Arthur?" Her makeup is totally ruined; giant mascara smudges under her eyes give her a haunted, raccoon-like effect. "You skated your very best and I skated my very worst and we both ended up in the same place. They'll never remember anything except that we lost."

"Don't think like that,"says Arthur. Mal is turning onto the exit ramp for I-90 now, and Arthur suddenly feels dread prickle the back of his neck. "I think we should pull over and talk about this," he says. 

"There's nothing to talk about,"Mal says. "It's all over. Time for us to wake up, Arthur."

Arthur's insides plummet in what feel like slow motion; he's already reaching to grapple for the steering wheel even as she's turning the vehicle the wrong way, into the lane of oncoming interstate traffic; he hears his own screams from far away, calling Mal’s name over and over; sees the horrified face of the driver in the approaching car; hears them both screaming as she rakes her nails across his face and he tries to swerve out of the road into the emergency lane; feels his body crumple like paper against the impact; then nothing. 

 

 

Arthur wakes surrounded by flowers. It takes him a few moments to register that he’s not in a garden, and a few moments more to realize that he’s not in a funeral home, but in a hospital room, a room filled wall to wall with flowers and baskets and stuffed animals and more standing wreaths than he’s ever seen in one place before. At first, Arthur doesn’t understand, but then his mother is there, bending down, saying, “Oh, thank god, you’re awake, he’s awake,” and everything comes back in a sharp wave of pain. 

His voice is raspy when he tries to speak, but he only needs one syllable. 

His mother strokes his hair back from his face. “She’s going to be okay, honey,” she says. “She’s going to be fine.”

Arthur closes his eyes again. “I’m sorry,” he hears himself whispering. “I didn’t know, mom, I didn’t know.”

“I know,” his mother says, still smoothing his forehead. “It’s all right. It’s all going to be alright. You’re going to get well. Just focus on that. Don’t think about anything else.”

Arthur sleeps. 

 

 

No one has to tell Arthur that he’ll never skate competitively again. His patella is completely shattered, fractured in more than a dozen places from the impact of the crash. After his second surgery, he starts physical therapy, and his muscles move so differently that he cries more from humiliation and anger than pain. 

His mom keeps saying he’s just lucky the whole thing happened while he was at home, near his family, near a nationally ranked hospital. There’s nothing lucky about it to Arthur, so he just doesn’t say anything at all.

The flowers and cards and letters and candy and cakes and fruit baskets and stuffed animals and postcards keep coming, and keep coming. That alone tells Arthur that whatever happened to them was some kind of big deal. The nurses who keep stopping by from other wards to ask him to sign autographs and tell him they support him—that’s another sign.

But he doesn’t get it until his second week of recovery, when he’s been moved out of intensive care and into the physical therapy unit of Mass Gen. A tall man in a metallic gray suit walks into his room and glances appraisingly at all the flowers around him. Arthur’s family has already moved over half of the gifts home, and given most of the flowers away to other wings of the hospital, but they just keep coming.

“Do you know who I am?” the man asks. Arthur tries to place him, but his head is still kind of fuzzy—the doctors have informed him pieces of his longterm memory will probably be hazy for a few weeks yet. After a moment he shakes his head.

“My name is Saito,” the man says. “I’m the CEO of Proclus Global. Your skating sponsor.”

“Oh,” says Arthur, abashed. Proclus is footing the bill for his hospital stay, including his physical therapy. He assumes they’re also doing the same with Mal, though she’s probably going to be an inpatient longer than he is. A lot longer, from what he’s heard.

“Sorry,” he says. “I do know who you are, I just—”

Saito waves away his excuses, and Arthur shuts up. 

“I assume you have heard about events in the world of figure skating since your unfortunate accident,” he says. 

Arthur shakes his head, oddly relieved Saito isn’t here to give him awkward condolences. “Not really,” Arthur says. “I was kind of asleep for the news cycle and my mom won’t let me have my laptop for another week.” He’d tried checking twitter briefly on his phone but had quickly gotten overwhelmed with messages from strangers. Martina had visited him daily, but so far she refused to let him ask her about skating.

“Then let me be the first to inform you that Dominick Cobb is under investigation by the ISU for inappropriate coaching techniques and emotionally abusing his students,” says Saito.”

“Oh,” says Arthur. He swallows. He wants to say something else, but somehow expending the energy to have a reaction where Cobb is concerned feels like more effort than its worth.

“He will most likely be banned from the sport. Needless to say he is no longer working under my employ,” says Saito.

“You dropped the sponsorship?” Arthur thinks of all the other members of Cobb’s team who will no longer be able to skate unless they can find other coaches. But Saito shakes his head.

“Proclus will continue to sponsor your teammates,” he says. “However, we will be bringing on new coaches. Anyone on the team who doesn’t want to continue training at the school will be given a stipend towards a new training center.”

“Oh,” says Arthur. “Sorry,” he says awkwardly.

Saito sends Arthur a withering look, as if to emphasize how utterly ludicrous it is for Arthur to be apologizing for anything under the circumstances. Arthur considers apologizing for his previous apology, but thinks better of it. He notices that Saito hadn’t said he would be sponsoring him; it’s probably obvious to everyone by now that Arthur isn’t going to be skating for anyone. A new wave of bitter resentment rolls over him, and he clenches his fists in the bed sheets.

“Who’s the new coach?” he asks, instead of having a total breakdown over the end of his skating career in front of the multi-billionaire in his hospital room.

“One of them should be familiar, at least,” says Saito. “Your former coach, Martina Andrejevic. She’ll be bringing with her a few students of her own, some of whom you know.”

“That’s—wow,” says Arthur. “That’s the first good news I’ve heard since I’ve been in this room.”

As soon as he says it, he feels a twinge of guilt. He waits for the recrimination, the reminder that his survival is good news. But Saito doesn’t bother. Instead he shoots Arthur the glimmer of a smile, the first since he walked in. That probably shouldn’t make Arthur warm up to him more, but somehow it does.

“She’ll be bringing with her at least one new student who approached her after Worlds,” Saito continues. “He’ll be joining the school next week. However, he also made a particular request. I’m here to discuss it with you.”

“With me?” Arthur frowns.

Saito nods. He frowns at the room as if he’s continually disappointed by how small it is. “I realize it is early yet to be thinking about your future,” he says. “I assume you will be fully engaged in your physical recovery. But have you given any thought to your career in the meantime?”

Arthur blurts out, “What career?” before he can stop himself.

Saito chuckles. “There’s no reason you need to stay away from the sport, Mr. Lake,” he says. “You have many assets besides your skating abilities that can be useful.”

“Useful,” Arthur says blankly. “To _who_?”

Saito glances at the door and indicates with a tilt of his head that it’s okay for whoever’s outside to enter. “I believe you know one another,” he says.

Arthur sits up straighter in his clunky hospital bed. A moment later he’s grateful for the instant of advance warning: of all the people he could ever have expected to walk in, the man who pokes his head around the doorframe before awkwardly shuffling in is nowhere on the list.

“Hullo, Arthur,” says Eames. “Glad to see you’re looking well.”

“Mr. Eames will be working with Ms. Andrejevic beginning next week,” says Saito. “But he would also like to work with you as an assistant coach when you’re ready.” He pauses, presumably for Arthur’s reaction.

Arthur blinks at them both. “A coach,” he echoes blankly.

“Mr. Eames is within his rights to ask you to work with him independently,” Saito says. He sounds as if this is just like any other boring business venture. “However, given your former relationship with Ms. Andrejevic and the fact that you are still technically associated with the Proclus program, he wanted to afford you the opportunity to continue on with the school as a coach.”

Eames rubs the back of his head and then sticks his hands in his pocket. “You probably know my old coach, Hamilton, is planning on retiring next year. After we heard Andrejevic was coming to the Proclus team, he suggested I talk to her about making the switch. When I talked to her, your name naturally came up, and she and I both felt it would be worth finding out if you were interested.”

Arthur is still staring. “This isn’t a joke,” he says after another moment’s pause. 

Eames looks crestfallen. “I know it’s sudden,” he says. “I only thought, since I’m going to be switching anyway—”

“You thought you’d, what,” Arthur says, “throw me a pity vote?”

Eames takes his hands out of his pockets. “No, of course not,” he says. “Arthur, this is absolutely not about—”

“Not about drawing public sympathy? Add the invalid with the tragic backstory to your adoring entourage of people who’ll tell you LED lights are the future of ice skating?” He’s sitting fully upright, now, one hand clenched around the knee that still works. “Christ, you couldn’t even wait a week? Are you that much of a fucking opportunist?”

“Jesus,” Eames snaps. “I wanted to work with you because you’re bloody brilliant and I couldn’t stand the idea of you cooped up in recovery for months, all that talent going to waste.”

“And what if I’d rather skate against you,” Arthur says coldly. “Did you even stop to think about that?”

Eames starts to reply, then closes his mouth abruptly. He shifts where he stands, and Saito, who’s been gazing unconcernedly out the window, looks back at Arthur and says calmly, “You really haven’t been keeping up with the news. The entire world knows you won’t be skating competitively again.”

Arthur looks between them. It’s nothing he hasn’t been thinking to himself for the last week straight, but hearing it said like that, bluntly and without any false optimism to blunt the reality—it’s like being pushed out of a plane without a parachute. 

He sits for a moment, in freefall.

When Eames finally says his name into the abyss of Arthur’s thoughts, it’s quiet, more like a sigh than a word. Arthur looks up, hating that Eames is the one who has to be here to witness this moment. Eames bites his lip. 

“I know this is rotten timing,” he says, “and I know what happened to you is one of the worst things that could happen to anyone. But I swear to you, pity never entered the equation. No one, anywhere, wants to see you leave the sport no matter what happens. I thought, fuck, I’d better make this offer before someone else does. It's not some sort of consolation prize. There are coaches with years of experience who’d kill to have the chance to work for Saito.”

“Which is why you can’t be serious,” Arthur says. “I have absolutely no coaching experience.”

“You have one of the best skating records in the history of the league at the junior level,” says Eames. “And you have amazing self-choreographed routines that devote special attention to footwork.”

“You suck at footwork,” says Arthur, not particularly sorry for feeling vicious.

“Exactly,” says Eames. “Hence the need for a coach who’s better at it than I am.”

“This is—this is insane,” says Arthur. “I can’t—I can’t. I’ll think about doing contract work for Saito if he needs me, but I’m not going to fucking coach you.”

“At least think about it,” Eames says.

“Go,” says Arthur. “Just—just fucking go.”

Saito nods and exits as unobtrusively as he came. Arthur tilts his head and glares at Eames, who’s still standing in the corner of the room, fixing Arthur with that steady, contemplative gaze. 

Arthur takes it all back; he doesn’t know how he could have ever thought that look was hot.

“You’re really not good at doing what you’re told,” he says. “Not a good sign for a working relationship.”

“Look,” says Eames. “Don’t decide anything today. The offer is serious. You can take all the time you need to think about it.”

“Are you done?”

“Not yet,” says Eames. He rocks back on his heels with a grimace. “I wanted you to know something.” 

Arthur waits for more. “What,” he finally prompts.

“Your free skate,” Eames says. The tone of his voice makes Arthur’s throat tighten. Makes him aware of something hard and brittle he didn’t know he was keeping lodged in his chest. 

“That’s what skating should feel like all the time,” Eames says softly. “That’s what I want my skating to be.”

Arthur knows he should reply, that at the very least he should say thank you. But all he can think of is that he’ll never have that again. He’ll never feel the wind on his face in the middle of a triple lutz, or the satisfying jolt when he hits the ground. He’ll never again take the ice left-foot first, stomach full of butterflies before a performance. He’ll never have that feeling of total control over the ice—that sense that a whole stadium full of people is glued to his every move, that he has them just where he wants them. He’ll never stand around eyerolling with all the other contestants while some poor schmuck skates to _Romeo and Juliet_. He’ll never hear “The Crisis” without feeling the way he feels now, like all the air has gone out of his lungs and taken his entire future with it.

He’ll never skate like that again. 

And below the dull, endless ache of knowing that he’ll never skate like that again is another hurt, a hurt that starts with Mal not even bothering to show up for his performance and ends with her—with her trying to—

He squeezes his eyes shut.

When he comes out of the moment, Eames is gone.

 

 

It takes him half a day to work up the nerve, but when his dad comes by in the afternoon, Arthur makes him hand over his tablet. “A lot has happened while you were sleeping,” his dad says.

He does a quick headline sweep first. The accident returns thousands upon thousands of search results. The part of Arthur that’s not overwhelmed tells himself bitterly that this is exactly what Mal was hoping for. He’s avoided asking after Mal so far but most of the headlines report the same thing: after being taken off suicide watch, she was transported from Mass Gen to McLean, where she’s been under intensive psychiatric care.

Fine, Arthur thinks, blinking hard. That’s fine.

The investigation into Cobb involves allegations of abuse from multiple students past and present. Nearly all of the articles come with footage or a photograph of Cobb grabbing Mal’s arm after her performance. It looks worse on camera than Arthur remembers, but he can’t bring himself to be anything but glad.

Next he reads about Martina and Eames. He’s not surprised she hasn’t said anything to him—she’s never been one to gossip, and in her visits she’s mostly focused on getting him to talk about his recovery progress. He is surprised to learn that she’d been planning to join Saito’s team even before the accident and Cobb’s firing. It doesn’t make Arthur feel less weird about being asked to join as a coach, but it relieves him a little to realize neither of them joined the school because of what happened to him and Mal.

He’s two pages into googling info on Eames’ old coach’s decision to retire when he sees it: **World Champion reacts to rival’s tragic accident.**

He clicks before he can tell himself it’s a bad idea, and sees video footage of Eames outside the stadium in Boston. The timestamp says the interview was filmed the day after the accident, which may explain why Eames looks so shaken. Arthur wonders if he’d only just found out.

The interviewer asks him for his reaction to the accident. Eames winces, like he can’t believe he’s getting asked something so inane, and Arthur skips ahead to the next question. It’s about whether Arthur’s accident changes Eames’ strategy for next season. If anything, Eames looks doubly offended.

“Look,” he says. “Arthur is—he, he’s not just an obstacle standing between me and a medal.” He rubs the back of his head, the way he did talking to Arthur earlier that day, and Arthur wonders if it’s a sign of frustration or consternation or what.

“Arthur Lake is one of the true greats,” Eames is saying. His voice is shaking a little. Maybe he really had just found out about the accident. 

“He’s, he skates like [John Curry](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z79TMsYRnEc), he’s all artistic lines and technical perfection and meticulous attention to detail, and he’s that sort of performer, too—he’s the man most people totally overlook until he’s out there on the ice and he’s spellbinding and you just have to eat bloody crow because you’ve realized you should have been paying better attention all along.”

“So really removing him from your competition is a huge boost for you as a skater,” says the interviewer, who is apparently extremely obtuse.

Eames snaps, “No, not at all. Arthur Lake being out of skating isn’t some kind of default victory for me or for anyone. It’s a loss for the entire sport.”

And then he abruptly ends the interview.

Arthur stares.

Then he drags the stream to the beginning and watches it again.

When his mother joins them a little later, she pats Arthur on the shoulder and asks, “How was therapy today?”

 _Someone compared me to the greatest skater in history_ , Arthur doesn’t say.

Instead, he answers, “It was good,” and starts googling continuing education requirements for certified skating coaches.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Music used in this chapter:**  
> 
> The song from _Carmen Jones_ is “[Beat Out Dat Rhythm on a Drum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vbCk4rArJg&t=50)," sung by Pearl Bailey
> 
> Arthur’s “Mad World” routine (Adam Lambert, _American Idol_ S8) is possibly a combination of [this choreography style](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06xMkENM4Ik) and [this general tone](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8P3ddxLRgM).
> 
>  _Skyfall_ suite:  
> [Shanghai Drive](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwGxqSlH20A); [Silhouette](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlIQYaeY0lM); [Grand Bazaar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_dwx2J_WK8)
> 
> “[The Mercenaries](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4YTAncGuSs)” from the movie _Dark of the Sun_ , by Jacques Loussier.
> 
> Here's the Ladytron [remix of “Seventeen”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oItYRJCZTwU) I was thinking of. (I'm very sad that apparently no one has ever filmed themselves skating to Ladytron before and put it on YouTube. Get it together, skaters.)
> 
> “The Crisis” by Ennio Morricone comes from the soundtrack to the movie _The Legend of 1900_ ; for the long program, Arthur would have used a looped version like [this one.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lodKSiWlgrg) Here’s [Takahashi’s exhibition skate](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvNSdSA22l8) again.
> 
> John Curry [skating to Don Quixote](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z79TMsYRnEc) in the 1976 Olympics is considered a sport-changing performance because of all the artistic flourishes he included and the emphasis on elegance and artistry along with precision and high-powered jumps. 
> 
> There is only one [Brick House](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RtL68KBBhY).
> 
> (oh my god what even is this /o\ )


	2. Chapter 2

Eames doesn’t come to visit Arthur in the hospital again, but Martina does. By the time Arthur is officially discharged from Mass Gen a week and a half later, the two of them have mapped out a rough timeline for Eames’ coaching strategy over the next five months—the blessed stretch between April and September when no major senior-level competitions are held. They both agree Arthur will need to break down and rebuild Eames’ component elements, something Martina won’t have a lot of time for. Since Eames is a largely independent skater, Martina has insisted on Arthur blocking in a full week of basic training which Arthur suspects is solely to help Eames wrap his head around the concept of being micromanaged. 

Eames’ previous coach is a product of the British skating program, which is to say, he’s good enough to train the average skater, but not brilliant enough to truly coach someone like Eames. According to general skating-circuit gossip (which Arthur had always managed to have an ear for when it came to Eames even if he pretended like he was above it—every skater has his weakness), Hamilton had mostly left Eames alone to train himself over the last season, as if he’d thrown up his hands and realized he’d taken Eames as far as he reasonably could. Eames skipped the British nationals last year in order to compete in the NHK qualifier, partly because no one ever takes the British program seriously, not even British skaters; but also, Arthur can’t help thinking, because he’s headstrong and does whatever he wants.

This is a quality Arthur is greatly looking forward to wrecking.

By the time he’s formally discharged, Arthur has collected a number of other things as well:

  * An impressive array of remote recovery specialists, in addition to what he’s been assured is an entire coterie of physical therapists awaiting him at Saito’s training complex.
  * A hilariously awkward CPM machine that he’s required to use twice a day. CPM stands for “continuous passive motion” but Arthur it’s really more like continuous physical misery. Still, it helps, so he grits his teeth and uses it.
  * A rather elegant looking walking stick that he addresses alternately as Patrick Caner, The Cane Mutiny, and the Battleship Potem-cane. 



He’s also down a roommate. After he informed his parents he’d be returning to Vermont, they had apparently collaborated with Mal’s parents to move all of her things out of his apartment. Saito’s taking care of paying her half of the rent on their apartment through the end of the current lease; Arthur hadn’t wanted another replacement roommate—he figures all the remote recovery specialists coming in and out all day will be enough company for a while. 

Arthur isn’t entirely convinced that all of this attention and care isn’t a pre-emptive effort at warding off a lawsuit from Arthur’s family, but he honestly appreciates it. From what little he’s managed to glean, he knows Saito’s doing even more for Mal and her family, even paying a therapist in New York City who specializes in eating disorders to fly up to Boston to work with her. But it still might not be enough to stave off a lawsuit from Mal’s family against Proclus for hiring Cobb to begin with, especially after Arthur gets a visit from the police one day shortly before he’s discharged.

“Mal’s therapists have some concerns,” a short, solemn detective tells Arthur. “Based on statements Mal has made to them, they think there may have been a sexual component to her relationship with Cobb.”

For a moment Arthur feels like he’s experiencing the impact of the crash all over again. Then over the din of the roaring in his head he hears her continue: “Did you know or witness anything that would support that line of inquiry?”

Arthur is shaking his head. “No,” he says. “No, no, I would have known—I’m her best friend, she would have told me—” he breaks off, stricken all over again as all the warning signs he’s analyzed over the last few weeks collide again, forming an entirely new picture: her unwillingness to discuss Cobb with him, her reluctance to leave Cobb for a new coach, Cobb’s handsiness, his strange jealousy of Arthur’s relationship with Mal; his snide, “You don’t know your girl at all.”

“She—she’s so much younger than he is,” he says blankly, but it all fits, all of it. “Jesus.”

“Then you did see something?” prompts the detective, and Arthur tries, haltingly and feeling like an absolute _moron_ , to tell her what little he thinks he saw, what very little he thinks he knows, of Mal’s relationship with Dom Cobb. 

Before he makes the long trip back up to Vermont, he spends a week at home, letting his mom fuss over him and his siblings awkwardly avoid him. He emails back and forth with Eames about training, a little, and that’s unexpectedly nice. If he’d had to guess he’d have assumed Eames was the kind of infrequent correspondent who never checked email and would reply with just “k” to everything when he did. 

Instead, to Arthur’s surprise, Eames shoots him a rundown of his planned morning practice regimen for the first two weeks. Arthur replies back with tweaks and suggestions based on careful scrutiny of Eames’ skates over the last season—hours spent taking scrupulous notes on Eames’ YouTube channel and not at all spent re-watching that robot routine and wondering what Eames’ deltoids would feel like under his hands. 

Eames replies with tweaks and suggestions to Arthur’s tweaks and suggestions, and they go back and forth like that for two days, not quite arguing, but—well, it’s impossible to banter via email, but it feels a little like that anyway; at least it does until he comes into the kitchen while he’s reading Eames’ lengthy diatribe against the hypocrisy of a sport that has a serious technical term called “death spiral” yet penalizes backflips in competition, because god forbid skaters like Surya Bonaly actually have an advantage, and Arthur shoots back that, well, they couldn’t exactly penalize her for skating while black, and Eames responds immediately, ‘Bonaly too black, Harding too white trash, Weir/Galindo too gay, Browning too all of the above’—and Arthur’s mother remarks:

“That’s the first real smile I’ve seen you wear in a while.”

Arthur instantly scowls and pretends to be doing very busy and important coaching work.

Procus buys him an SUV for absolutely no reason other than a) hush money and b) it has more legroom so he can drive long distances without aggravating his injury, and has more space for carting around Patrick Caner and his new assortment of medication and braces and weird medical shit. 

Before he makes the long drive back to Burlington, Arthur braces himself, and makes the other trip he’s been dreading.

He’s been building this visit up in his mind for so long that he’s totally unprepared for the reality, which is that he can’t even get in the door.

Arthur gets asked to wait, then gets taken aside into a tiny conference room with a minimalist approach to decoration and a single green bamboo tree on a blinding white coffee table. Arthur feels healthier and more well-balanced just walking in, but: “I’m sorry,” says Mal’s therapist. “She’s not ready to see you yet.”

“Oh,” says Arthur blankly. He fights back a wave of anger. It’s been _six weeks_ , he thinks—six weeks of dealing with this, of having to listen to his own hospital-assigned personal therapist talk about forgiveness and understanding, and she won’t even _see_ him?

“You have to understand,” the therapist says gently, in a cool voice that suggests Arthur’s the one being unreasonable, “Mallory is going through intense personal therapy and recovery. I can’t talk about her therapy in detail, of course, because of confidentiality reasons, but let me assure you, she’s got a lot to deal with.”

“Years of undiagnosed mental illness, I know,” says Arthur curtly. “She’s bipolar, she’s depressed, she’s anorexic. Her self-esteem is virtually non-existent. Cobb spent a year emotionally abusing her, maybe sexually, too. I get it.”

The therapist looks surprised, like he hadn’t expected Arthur to know as much about his patient as he did, and Arthur’s anger turns sharp and brittle. “She’s my sister,” he says, trying to sound patient. “We grew up together, we trained together, we lived together for years. She’ll want to see me.”

But the therapist shakes his head. “Mallory has been through a lot in the last year. There’s doubtless a lot she kept from you out of a willingness to protect you. She feels extremely guilty for what she did to you—I can tell you that much—”

“Does she—” Arthur blurts out, and then stops. He finds himself on the brink of asking, ‘Does she know I can’t skate ever again?’ and then has to stop himself. It doesn’t matter whether she knows or not, he reminds himself. What matters is forgiveness. Letting go of bitterness.

The look on his face must not be very forgiving, because the therapist sighs. 

“As her therapist, I’m not willing to recommend a visitation until you’ve each had more time to process and deal with the trauma you’ve endured. If you aren’t ready to extend forgiveness, Mr. Lake, it could frankly undo weeks of therapy for her at this point, because she values you so much.”

“Oh, _really_?” Arthur blurts incredulously before he can help himself. “She’s got a funny way of showing it.”

The therapist gives him a pitying look and Arthur knows he’s lost.

“Come back in another six weeks,” says the therapist, and ushers Arthur politely but firmly out the door and on his way.

 

Being back at Proclus training headquarters is a whole other set of mixed emotions, but dealing with them is mostly easier than dealing with Mal, so Arthur dives in headfirst. Being around Martina again is easily the best part of this whole arrangement, but with Martina comes Eames, and Eames is a lot to deal with. He’s obnoxiously chipper in the mornings and slinks in wearing godawful t-shirts and wife-beaters that cling to his muscles and drive Arthur crazy. He refuses to hold the door open when he gets there first ahead of Arthur and Patrick Caner, a gesture Arthur hate and appreciates in equal measure. He’s so sloppy on his turns Arthur seriously wonders if he’s doing it _deliberately_ as some kind of fuck-you to the sport and/or Arthur personally; but when Arthur finally gets fed up and asks him this Eames only beams at him and says, “Ah, that’s the Arthur Lake I’m paying for. I was wondering when he’d show up,” and Arthur is so infuriated he makes him practice choctaws for the next hour.

By the end of the first two weeks, Arthur has a list. It is a list of things Arthur and Eames have argued about. This is what’s on it, so far:

  * whether Eames needs to re-learn how to do a goddamn turn-out (yes)
  * whether Eames is actually checking his shoulders after spins (no)
  * whether Eames needs to spend an hour each morning relearning how to do twizzles instead of what he’s been doing, which is covering up with really fast double-threes and hoping Arthur and judges won’t notice or care (yes; yes; judges might not notice or care but Arthur isn’t an idiot and he hopes Eames isn’t planning on wasting his time)
  * whether Eames’ shitty posture is a deliberate attempt to annoy Arthur (he suspects not, and Arthur knows he knows better but Eames shouldn’t think for a moment that Arthur won’t make him skate around the rink with the IOC regulations balanced on his head if he can’t straighten his fucking shoulders)
  * whether Eames should put in more Biellmann spins as a part of his regular routine (no, and has he lost his mind?)
  * the way Eames’ brackets look like he’s channeling Elvis at the height of his pelvic thrust era, and whether they can exorcise this unclean spirit before the U.S. Classic (god, Arthur hopes so, thank you very much) 
  * no more fucking LED lights, does he want to be taken seriously in the sport or get written off as that guy with that one viral video
  * which two of the six grand prix events Eames should compete in to maximize his competitive advantage (of _course_ Eames will be doing both Japan and Russia, and if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll carefully read through the sixteen pages of research Arthur has compiled on each competition and every likely competitor he’ll be facing)
  * music routines
  * music routines
  * music routines



The thing about music routines is that inevitably the fights about music routines end up skirting a bigger disagreement that both of them, by tacit mutual agreement, perpetually skate by and avoid. But gradually That Argument hovers out there over everything, and Arthur knows it’s going to erupt sooner or later. And of course, he’s right.

The deal is Arthur is supposed to be a technical coach, working with Eames in the morning to structure his workout sessions, identify technical weaknesses, and re-build his footwork from the ground up. So far, so good. 

One of Arthur’s roles is to help Eames’ choreographer out with the footwork in his 2016-2017 routines. Arthur has come to realize very quickly that for all the end result looks like Eames rolled out of bed and staggered onto the ice and accidentally delivered an Olympic-worthy performance, every decision he makes is a strategic one, starting with his decision to hire a tiny ballerina to choreograph his muscular athletic performances. There’s still a lot about ice skating that Ariadne doesn’t know, but she’s an incredibly smart, quick study, and Arthur is duly impressed. Even better, he sees easily how his strengths can augment her knowledge gaps, which tells him Eames thought a lot about the kind of technical coach he wanted to hire before he came to Arthur. This is also good, except the more evidence Arthur gets that Eames genuinely wanted to hire him because of what he knows and what he’s good at, and not as some kind of pity gesture, the weirder he feels.

The problem is that Ariadne can’t start choreographing until Eames has chosen a music routine. The ice skating season doesn’t really get going til September, so they still have a little lag time to spare to pick a really solid routine. Most skaters, in Arthur’s experience, especially before the ban on words was lifted, go for obvious crowd-pleasers that can help them win in big settings: Puccini, John Williams, all the composers Arthur has blacked out as his Cardinal Rule. But Eames, who thankfully seems dead-set against all those composers, too, devotes entire afternoons to hunting for the right music choice, and he insists on enlisting Arthur and Ariadne’s help. 

Ariadne has dutifully been scoping out dozens upon dozens of contenders for Eames’ short program, long program, and exhibition music. Despite his general disapprobation of Eames’ thing for musical theatre, Arthur has to admit when she comes up with [“You’ve Got To Pick a Pocket Or Two”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VogHwP0C5VY) for the short program that it’s pretty much perfect. It’s a perfect fit for Eames’ personality, or rather the kind of personality Arthur thinks Eames is going for on the ice—all deceptive insouciance, impudence with a touch of rascal. Plus, Eames loves props, and Arthur can already see him skating around with baggy Chaplin pants and a baggy coat, pulling gold watches out of his deep pockets. It’s dumb and fun and they all love it, so he puts up only a token protest. 

The long program, though, is the one that really matters, and it’s elusive and tricky and the search for it is consternating. More than once Ariadne throws down her whiteboard marker and says, “ _Why_ can’t we just do the _Godfather_ soundtrack again?” and Eames says patiently, “Because Arthur will quit if we use anything by Nino Rota, and we can’t have him quitting yet, can we? He only just got here.”

Arthur, being Arthur, had handed them both a list on the first day, mostly for Ariadne’s benefit: 

Long program wish list:

  * Absolutely no: _Carmen_ , _Phantom of the Opera_ , “Malaguena,” _Zorba_ , _Scheherazade_
  * Off-limits: Morricone, Bizet, Lloyd Webber, John Williams, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, and absolutely no fucking Nino fucking Rota (underlined twice)
  * Ideally would be by a Russian composer ( _NOT_ Tchaikovsky! Rachmaninoff only if absolutely desperate) 
  * No words (and _no_ Broadway)
  * Layered or textured composition that helps the choreography build excitement
  * Nothing too commercial/overdone/well-known
  * Builds to a climax (obvious)
  * Needs minimal editing (so about six minutes long already or can easily be cut to 6 minutes)
  * emphasizes drama (not fun)



“Why a Russian composer?” Ariadne had asked. Eames laughed and settled back in his chair, giving Arthur an appreciative glance. 

“Because, my dear Ariadne,” he said “The Russian judges form a voting bloc, and they very much like to be catered to.”

Ariadne’s brow furrowed. “I thought they outlawed that in like the ‘90s.”

“It was 2002, and that’s what they want you to think,” Eames grinned.

Since then, armed with the List, Ariadne has been scoping out dozens upon dozens of contenders for Eames’ short program, long program, and exhibition music, and the three of them have spent most of the last two weeks listening, narrowing down, and discarding choices. 

After three days of listening to exhibition music hopefuls, Eames scratches his head and says simply, “I think I want to do ‘Take Me To Church,’” and Arthur’s mouth goes dry, because fuck, he can _see_ it, Eames skating to Hozier in a white tank top and jeans and nothing else; Eames’ massive body curling around those jumps like a lover, Eames bringing the house down and totally fucking making history; but also—

“No,” he says. “Everybody saw that Russian ballet video. You’ll look like a rip-off. The song’s already overdone, by the time winter rolls around it’ll feel completely outdated.”

“But it would make the audience cry,” says Eames reasonably, and he’s right, except—

“Refer back to my list, Eames,” Arthur says. “It’s got words. It’s under six minutes, we’d have to pad it out. It’s viral, it’s been all over the place, it’ll probably be a car ad by the time you skate to it. It’s too much.”

Eames bites his lip, and Arthur can’t help but add, “And I said go for a Russian composer, not piss off the entire Russian delegation.”

Eames stiffens. “And why would it piss them off?” he says, slowly, deliberately, and Arthur knows that he knows that Arthur knows that he knows exactly why it would piss them off.

“I’m pretty sure the Russians can read HuffPo just like the rest of us,” Arthur says dryly. “‘Eames thumbs nose at Russian homophobia’ isn’t exactly the kind of headline that will endear you at Moscow.” 

“Please, like anyone in the Russian delegation watches music videos,” Eames says with an eyeroll.

“These are the people who thought _their own skater_ was too flamboyant to win against Lysacek,” Arthur snaps. “And by the way, Lysacek skated to this a year ago, just to beef it up a little.”

“ _Fuck_ Lysacek,” Eames says darkly. “He doesn’t get to have this.”

“I agree,” Arthur says, “But if you use a song that references Russian homophobia, even obliquely, I’m pretty sure the Russian contingent would, A, find out about it, and, B, care.”

“And god forbid we bring queer identity anywhere near the ice, am I right?” says Eames frostily.

“You want to win,” Arthur says.

“No,” says Eames, “I don’t want to win, I don’t want to _just_ win, I want to _change the sport_. Or at least invite it to catch up to the 21st goddamn century.”

And Arthur looks back at him, his earnest, determined face and the plea in his eyes, and finds he can’t speak for a moment.

“The IOC is enough of a shit show without you bringing politics onto the ice,” he says at last.

“I’m not bringing politics onto the ice, Arthur,” Eames says. “I’m bringing myself. It’s the IOC that makes that political.”

“It’s a song with a super-famous music video that’s _explicitly_ political,” Arthur snaps. “That’s bringing politics onto the ice. It’s one thing to skate while gay. It’s another to drape yourself in a rainbow flag and take potshots at the Russian government!”

“Oh, that’s an excellent idea, maybe I _will_ drape myself in a rainbow flag,” Eames says. “Better yet, why don’t I just make out with one of the male judges during the routine? Ariadne, you can work that in between the double lutz and the triple salchow, yeah?” He stands up and storms out, and Arthur huffs and gets (much more slowly) to his feet. He casts Ariadne an apologetic look only to find that she’s had her headphones on for the last few minutes and has totally tuned them both out.

He shuffles off to find Eames. 

“It’s not that I think it’s improper or that I’m suffering from internalized homophobia,” he says when he locates Eames in the locker room, rummaging through his gym bag for an energy bar. “I just find it all sort of tacky. _Be Good Johnny Weir_ and all that. Bringing sexuality into it makes it fodder for tabloids and overshadows the artistry.”

Eames scratches the back of his head in that way he has. “Look, Arthur,” he says after a moment. “It’s been a very long time since Curry took the gold medal, and he was outed against his will—he didn’t set out to become a gay icon. The sport has evolved since then, and a lot of people don’t like the direction it’s evolved in.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Arthur retorts. “You think I haven’t researched every judge you’ll be facing this season? You think I don’t know exactly what their individual opinions are on gay politics in theory and men’s tights in practice? News flash—the culture war is over and the Elvis Stojkos have won.”

“But that’s exactly my point, Arthur,” Eames says, tossing his gym bag back in his locker and shutting it with a clang. “We have great men on the ice like Plushenko and Weir getting penalized for artistic creativity due to homophobia and toxic masculinity, regardless of whether or not they’re actually gay. Meanwhile queer women are god knows where, but they’re definitely not on podiums. Don’t you want to challenge that?”

“You brought me on board to help you play it straight!” 

“I brought you on board because I thought together we could maybe do something bigger!”

Eames is standing near Arthur, and Arthur thinks wildly about kissing him, and with that all at once the weight of this conversation is too much for him. “Look, I’m not saying you have to step back into the closet, I’m just saying you don’t have to give everything away. Leave a little mystery about who you really are.”

Eames huffs a tiny laugh at that. “That’s easy for you to say, skating in your ridiculous buttoned-up tailored suits looking like you just stepped out of GQ,” he says—and then he blanches, and Arthur feels the burn in his throat, instantly, like it never went away: he’s never skating again. He’s _never skating again._

They stare at each other, Eames clearly fighting against the urge to drop an apology on him, until finally Arthur relents a little. “I wore those suits because I like wearing suits,” he says finally. “Not because I needed to prove my masculinity. Just skate for yourself. Don’t skate for anything else. Not a cause, not for posterity. It’s not worth it.” He bites back the bitterness, and steps around Eames towards the door. 

“You know, I really thought you had more imagination than that,” Eames says over his shoulder. “It’s in there, somewhere. Surely.”

Arthur tosses back, “I have plenty of imagination. I just don’t waste it on the Russian judges,” and leaves the room.

 

By the time they both make their way back to the sound booth, Ariadne has her laptop open and YouTube pulled up. “I want you to listen to this,” she says. “But keep an open mind.”

They listen to it. When it’s finished, they’re both staring blankly at her and each other. 

“Schnittke is a Russian composer whose music was considered subversive and dangerous by the Soviets,” Ariadne said, “but when he died he was still given a major state funeral. The music makes a political statement without going overboard. I know it’s got words and it’s too short and it doesn’t end with a climax—”

“It fades away into nothing,” Arthur says.

“Just like your Morricone from last season,” Eames points out, unnecessarily. 

“—But the words are in Latin so they wouldn’t distract the audience, and it’s layered and dramatic and I can make it work,” Ariadne says.

“This is really risky,” Arthur says. “Is there another movement we could draw from to pad out the middle?” 

Ariadne takes a breath. “I was thinking we do the opening Requiem, then the middle section of the Credo, then fade out on the end of the Requiem again.”

“Well, let’s hear it,” Eames says.

Ariadne makes a face and tabs to the Credo.

This time when it’s over, there’s a long, shocked pause, and then:

“Did I hear a _tuba_?” Eames says.

“And a _snare drum,_ ” Arthur says, horrified.

“And an electric guitar,” Ariadne says proudly. “And don’t forget the gongs, audiences love gongs!” 

“I don’t know if we can take the audience this far off the map,” says Arthur.

“But that’s what Eames wants,” says Ariadne.

Arthur snorts. “What Eames wants and what Eames needs us to give him aren’t exactly mutual.”

“No, Arthur, Eames needs _you_ to draw the map so _I_ can point him towards the dragons,” Ariadne says. “You draw the box, I think outside it. This is really pretty close to the spirit of your list, and it’s weird enough that nobody else will have anything like it all season. You wanted to get away from 19th century Romantic crap, here you go.”

“Let’s listen to it again,” Eames says suddenly.

So they listen again, to both movements back to back. And the lulling swell of the opening starts to get to Arthur. He can see Eames swaying against the rise and ebb of those musical lines, lulling the audience into going down with him into one emotional state only to jar them awake with the darkness of the Credo (and the tubas and guitars). He can see it. More than that, he thinks he kind of likes it. When the climax of the opening hits, Arthur gets chills. The dissonance, the purity, the unexpected instrumentation—it’s totally Eames, in a way. It’s kind of totally Arthur, in a way that is totally unlike the way that it’s also totally Eames. 

Shit, he thinks. He would skate to this kind of thing, if he could—if he’d thought it wouldn’t have been too wild or avante-garde or whatever for a mainstream audience to handle. If he could skate, now, could skate to whatever he wanted—he’d skate to this.

It hits him all at once, suddenly, that _this_ is what Eames means when he talks about wanting something bigger. He doesn’t just want to skate: he wants to be a performance artist—to create art that’s hypnotic and weird and confusing, art that’s political and controversial, art they talk about decades from now. 

Arthur’s job isn’t to bark at him about rules—it’s to tether him and his choreography as loosely as he can to performance regulations so he can run as far afield as he wants without ever running amok of the IOC.

“Let’s do it,” he hears himself saying. Eames looks at him sharply, surprised.

“I can work with this if you can, Eames,” Arthur says.

Eames’ smile curls lazy and slow and gradually resolves itself into a smirk.

“Then let’s get to work,” he says.

 

 

Ten weeks after Arthur’s release from the hospital, one of his remote recovery specialists squeezes his knee in a bunch of places and tells him that if he’s very careful and very slow, he can get back on the ice.

Arthur doesn’t actually try it until a few days later. It’s after ten, and everyone else has gone home except for the janitors, Lautaro, the night manager who runs the zamboni, and Arthur, who’s been sticking around inventing reasons to loiter until he can have the rink to himself. 

When the lights have dimmed and the rink is silent, Arthur slips on his skates. It’s only been two months since he wore them last, but they pinch his ankles and he has to loosen the laces a little. He tests the weight before he stands up—slowly extending his leg, letting his rebuilt patella get used to the idea—and can already feel his stomach knotting at the difference, at how much heavier his blades feel, how stiff his joints are. Christ, not skating for two months is a lifetime in the world of professional sports, he thinks, recrimination washing over him, before he reminds himself that it doesn’t matter at this point if it’s been two months or two years. 

He stands and walks slowly over to the edge of the ice. He shouldn’t feel nervous, but he has to stand there for a moment anyway, breathing in and out steadily until he unclenches enough to feel the tension leave his shoulders. Maybe he shouldn’t be going out on the ice this soon, he thinks; maybe taking a fall at this point would set him back months. 

But the ice is there, just waiting for him, so Arthur puts his left blade onto the rink, reverting by habit to the long-time superstition, and glides forward.

His balance is immediately so off-kilter he nearly falls flat on his face. His posture and alignment feel all wrong, his legs are shaky and wobbly, like they haven’t worked in years—but he’s done it, he’s on the ice, and something sharp and painful wells up in his throat and leaves him all at once. He veers towards the edge and grasps the wall, having traveled the astonishing length of three or four feet—but it’s something.

He realizes his heart is in his throat, where it shouldn’t be, but he’s already pushing off again, letting his body adjust, getting used to the feeling of his skates again. The air currents curl his hair and chill his shoulders as he moves, and _god_ he’d missed this, just this—this feeling of gliding slowly over the ice. 

Tentatively he tries a forward stroke, just one, bending his good right leg and pushing off with his left. He sails forward, automatically arching his left leg behind him and curving his left arm forward and right arm out, just slightly, just enough to get into position for a T-stop. After successfully coming to a halt, he tries the pattern again, this time with a sharper dime stop. 

For a moment he thinks he’s got it, but his knee protests the sharp, sudden turn, and Arthur winds up flailing ridiculously, barely managing to stay on his feet. He swallows his frustration. If he can’t even manage a dime stop, how can he expect to really skate again?

It’s ludicrous—he knows he can’t skate. He’ll be lucky if he’s ever able to do a jump again. He’ll never be able to compete. 

He knew that before stepping onto the ice, but now he’s overwhelmed with it, this feeling of flightlessness. 

That’s what he is: a flightless bird.

He realizes his eyes are stinging, and he furiously clamps down hard on the self-pity welling in his chest. He resets his posture and tries again, this time with a slow—so slow—series of swizzles. His legs are still wobbling, but he goes through them, once, twice, then three times before coming to a stop at the other side of the rink.

All the air leaves his lungs at once in a rush of relief. He’s been on the ice less than five minutes and he feels _exhausted_. He clings for a moment to the edge of the rink, forcing himself to breathe, before starting all over again: glide, stroke, lift, stop.

He skates until Lautaro comes around and reminds him he’s got to lock up soon. Arthur aches all over, but he’s grinning, really grinning for the first time in months, when he says goodnight.

 

Eames isn’t what Arthur thought he would be, not really, and this is starting to be a problem. Eames shows up promptly at 4:45 every morning to start prep work and begin the hours of pre-ice workouts and gym conditioning. Eames’ ipod is full of a hilarious assemblage of random music like obscure Japanese rock bands whose songs all sound the same—at least to Arthur when he steals it one day at lunch time—juxtaposed against a litany of vintage swing, bebop, and rap music. It’s such a bizarre combination he thinks Eames might be trolling him until he hears Eames humming “A String of Pearls” one day as he does his morning workout.

“Who _are_ you?” Arthur asks him irritably, but Eames, of course, can’t hear him because he’s got his earbuds in. Arthur scowls at him anyway, and Eames, looking delighted, sends him an incorrigible thumbs-up, as if he knows what Arthur’s thinking.

Eames is obsessed with tea. He stocks the kitchen with an assortment of ridiculous flavors and then insists on carving regular breaks in all of their schedules to brew it. Arthur thinks this is also ridiculous until the morning Eames hands him a mug of steaming white rose tea with just a dollop of milk and a dab of sugar, and Arthur all but floats away. He comes down slowly to find Eames smiling oddly at him. “Oh, shut up,” Arthur says, and Eames’ smile broadens slowly into a smug, self-satisfied smirk.

Arthur has convinced Eames not to do “Take Me To Church” even as an exhibition number, but once the subject has been tabled, he can’t stop thinking about it. Arthur can’t even be mad about this because, honestly, the concept of Eames ice dancing in an undershirt against a backdrop of pathos-filled homoeroticism is practically a lurid sexual fantasy. 

He should be used to seeing Eames’ muscles ripple across his broad shoulders, should be used to the power in his thighs and his calves where they flex and bend, the absolute perfection that is Eames’ ass tightening before going into a jump, and the way he looks when he’s been skating for a while, shirt plastered to his chest, sweat beading down his neck and pooling in his adam’s apple, tattoo glistening. 

Arthur, however, isn’t remotely closed to used to it, and the more Eames loosens up in front of him the more Arthur retreats into the safety of buttoned-up suits and absolute professionalism. The more Eames relaxes around him, the more Arthur demands exactitude. If Eames were flirty or careless, Arthur thinks, he’d know how to handle it better; but Eames is perfectly serious despite the deceptively laidback attitude. He’s careful, disciplined, ready with a wink and a grin on occasion, but never really focused on anything except the ice. It’s disgustingly hot, and Arthur does his best to treat Eames like the recalcitrant student he’d rather he were instead.

A part of him keeps thinking that surely, one day, Eames will break, will snap and bite back at Arthur’s snapped orders, his meticulous, granular daily regimen. He’s with Eames one-on-one for 90 minutes in the mornings, focused solely on basic training and footwork. It’s monotonous, particular work, and Arthur knows enough about Eames to know that it’s the kind of training that goes against his inherent nature.

But the explosion never comes. If anything, Eames is more focused and submissive when he’s with Arthur during their one-on-one time together than he is during his regular routine practice; he might question and demand an explanation if Arthur’s not being clear, but the temperamental head-butting Arthur is constantly braced for never arrives. It dawns on him gradually that perhaps the drama he’d grown accustomed to from Mal doesn’t have to accompany all his skating relationships; he doesn’t know whether the realization is a welcome one or not.

He oversleeps one morning after pushing himself too hard on the rink the night before; he’s been _so_ careful up until now, but they’d had a good day at practice yesterday, and Eames’ had nailed the climactic part of his Schnittke routine for the first time, and Arthur had stayed on the ice too long later after everyone else left, full of energy and possibility and resentment and a competitiveness he _knew_ was entirely misplaced but couldn’t shake off. He’s been slowly trying to work through the core basic elements, which involve more bending than he’s ever had to consider before. Now even doing a simple dip is apparently too much for him—not that he’d known that last night, when he’d been celebrating getting through most of the basic steps he learned when he was a kid.

Of course when he wakes up his left knee is swollen and complaining, and he’s set his own halting recuperation back at least a week, and he’s back to limping around with the cane, running too late to grab Starbucks on the way in, and everything sucks. So even though Eames has nailed the footwork Arthur has worked into the choreography for his short program, Arthur is relentless in making him go over it, step by step. Eames has passively submitted to Arthur’s completely anal fussiness up until now, and Arthur thinks viciously that today, surely, he’ll finally get Eames to break—but Eames only fixes him a long look after Arthur demands he go over each of his steps again in slow motion, and then acquiesces without so much as a word of protest.

The submissiveness only makes Arthur feel guilty on top of annoyed, and after ten minutes of watching Eames carefully run through the trickiest section of his pickpocket routine, he relents and calls him over to the edge of the rink.

“You’re fine,” he says, aware that he sounds anything but pleased to be issuing the compliment. “Run the whole thing.”

“The whole thing,” Eames echoes.

Arthur shrugs. “You’ve gotten my part of the choreography down. I’d like to see the whole thing.”

“Arthur,” says Eames guardedly, “have you eaten anything this morning?”

“What?” snaps Arthur.

“It’s just you seem a tad bit frazzled,” Eames says. And then, as if to illustrate his point, he reaches up and adjusts Arthur’s neckline, where Arthur is appalled to realize he’s left one side of his collar flap tucked beneath his waistcoat.

“If you’d rather do mohawks and swizzles for the next hour...” Arthur raises his eyebrows pointedly. Eames spreads his hand in a gesture of surrender.

“I’ll just go cue the music, shall I,” he says, and he’s heading for the sound booth before Arthur has recovered from the smile he tosses Arthur over his shoulder.

The thing is that watching Eames skate is almost as challenging for Arthur as competing against him. Eames is made of sinew and sunlight when he skates—when he’s not performing a routine and just skating for the glee of it, he reminds Arthur eerily of a big jungle cat moving through his native habitat, muscles coiled and full of strength, perfectly at home in his domain. When he slips on a persona, though, he’s transformed completely, and Arthur has a hard time paying attention to the things he’s supposed to be watching—footwork, posture, rotation and lift, all the things he’s there for. 

What he wants to do is just fucking _watch_ , be swept away in Eames’ ability to sell a performance. He’s never known anyone else who seems to take so completely to the acting element of the program. Most male skaters he knows seem eager to tone down the performative aspects of their routines, lest they seem too camp. Eames, though—from the moment he sets foot on the ice he’s someone completely different. This is only one of the first few times Eames has run through the short program. He should be more hesitant, more focused on jumps and memorization and technical work. And he _is_ , Arthur realizes, he is all of those things—but he’s also, incredibly, a turn-of-the-century vagrant gleefully picking pockets and letting the audience in on all his secrets with a wink and a roguish smile. It’s magical. It’s ridiculously unfair. 

It’s ridiculously, intolerably hot.

“I know I came into the triple combo too high,” Eames says after he’s done and Arthur is still trying to pick his jaw up off the floor. It takes him a moment.

“Arthur?” Eames says when Arthur doesn’t reply right away.

“I don’t... do you really need me here?” Arthur says, hating how helpless he sounds.

Eames starts. “What kind of a question is that? Of course I do.” 

“These morning exercises,” Arthur says through gritted teeth. “They’re just fucking busywork for you. You know they are. I don’t need you to waste my time anymore than you need me to waste yours.”

“Arthur,” Eames says, reaching for Arthur’s arm. “That’s not what they are. Thanks to you I’m skating better than ever—my technical proficiency is off the chart and Martina can’t say enough about how my footwork is improving.”

Arthur frowns in disbelief. “But I haven’t _done_ anything.”

Eames scoffs. “Arthur, you made me do compulsory figures wearing arm weights. You made me do an entire day full of swizzles with a _bloody book on my head._ And your choreography—all that alternating edgework and the section with the cross-mohawks, it’s fantastic. It’s fun and athletic and challenging and _graceful_ and it’s exactly what I wanted.”

“I’m making you practice baby steps,” Arthur blurts. “I don’t know where to take you from here.”

Eames sends him a half-smile, and Arthur realizes he’s still holding onto Arthur’s arm, his touch warm and firm. “You can take me where you’d go next if this were your routine and your season,” he says. “I believe your instincts are very, very good, Arthur, and if you’ll let me I’d like very much to exploit them.”

Arthur looks up sharply, but there’s nothing mocking in Eames’ expression.

“Besides,” Eames adds. “I’ve got nothing against baby steps. I know you’re not putting me through anything you’re not putting yourself through.”

Arthur blanches. Eames’ gaze holds steady.

“I didn’t think anyone knew,” Arthur says stiffly. 

“You still skate beautifully,” Eames says.

Arthur swallows. “I overdid it last night,” he says, gesturing wryly to his cane. “I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

“I want you to,” Eames says. “If it helps, I mean. God knows it’s not like I don’t need the discipline.”

Arthur stares at him. “I was a dick to you,” he blurts all at once. Eames blinks. “All those times you came up to me when we were competing,” Arthur says, making himself get the words out, “I was a total asshole to you because my life and my skating were both going to hell and I didn’t trust anyone in this sport and couldn’t figure out why anybody as good as you were would be paying me compliments.”

“It wasn’t some sort of attempt to psych you out during the competition,” Eames says. “I promise you that, Arthur.”

“I _know_ that now,” Arthur says. He knows he’s gone red, and he hates how humiliated all this makes him feel. “I thought you were amazing. I wish—I wish I’d had the chance to skate against you one last time.”

Eames’ expression shifts subtly, and it makes Arthur’s throat tighten. “So do I,” he says. “But this, Arthur—the two of us, working together like this—it’ll be even better.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Eames grins. “Because with your brains and my beauty,” he says, “we’ll blow the IOC away.”

And Arthur, allowing himself to only barely suppress an answering smile, replies as dryly as he can, “Well, Mr. Eames, for now I’d like to see a little less blowing and a little more external hip rotation.”

Eames beams at him, then takes Arthur’s hand and draws it to his lips. Arthur is too startled to do anything but let him.

“Your wish is my command, darling,” he says, and Arthur is left sputtering and grateful Eames has turned away before he can see the blush spreading over Arthur’s face in his wake.

 

 

“Are you sure about this?” Ariadne asks him a few days later. They’re alone in the sound booth, and Arthur says, “go for it,” and she shrugs and hits play.

Eames is out on the rink doing warmup skating. When the music hits, he pauses for a moment, then looks back at the booth. His eyes find Arthur’s, and he moves effortlessly into a backwards glide, still holding Arthur’s gaze, before he jumps and sinks into a gorgeous layback, and all the hair stands up on Arthur’s arms.

“Queered lyrics,” Ariadne says.

“Yes,” Arthur says, and then they fall silent, watching. 

Eames skates exactly like he’s the desperate, distraught, desolate lover of the lyrics. Even freestyle, his choreography outstrips every other routine Arthur’s seen to this song. Arthur has a vision all at once of a dead silent stadium watching Eames skate to this in performance—of a million viewers around the world watching and witnessing.

“This is a stupid idea,” he says aloud, transfixed.

“This is an amazing idea,” Ariadne says.

On the rink, Eames throws himself into a final camel spin that drops into a sit spin that seems to be endless, pulsing and unwinding with the final notes of the song. 

When it ends, Arthur realizes Eames has his eyes closed, and it shouldn’t be this that tips him over the edge into his own endless spin of emotions, but it is, and Arthur has to lean forward and grip the windowsill of the sound booth just to have something to hang on to. 

It’s too much, he thinks. All of this, the politics, Eames’ passion for making futile grand gestures, the reason he brought Arthur here, the music, Eames, _Eames_.

“Do it,” he tells Ariadne. His voice is hoarse. “Choreograph this version for the exhibition.” He moves toward the door and makes his way outside, feeling Eames’ eyes on him and hardly knowing where to look in response.

He doesn’t know what he’s feeling until he’s sitting in his car driving aimlessly down the road back towards his apartment—no, back to Boston. He barely remembers how he got here, or anything that’s not Eames’ final blind spin, his eyes closed. 

_Fuck_ , he thinks, unsuccessfully blinking back tears. He’s overwhelmed with it, the need to _skate_ like that, the knowledge that he _can’t_ , he can barely do a dip, much less pour his heart and soul onto the ice the way Eames just did. And the worst, the most wonderful, exhilarating, terrifying part, the part he’d understood to his bones as soon as Eames locked eyes on him—it had been about more than just politics; it had been about _them._

Eames wants him. Eames is in love with him.

Just as he’s in love with Eames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here is where I confess that I started this whole story as a giant fuck you to Evan Lysacek in particular and systemic figure skating homophobia in general. 
> 
> In theory, this shouldn't take too much longer to finish, but, um, er, I have no idea what happens next. Help. /o\
> 
> Music in this chapter:
> 
>   * [Neon Jungle's cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ya46q6ALt9Q) of Hozier's "Take Me to Church"
>   * ["You’ve Got To Pick a Pocket Or Two"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VogHwP0C5VY) (oh, god, lol), from the musical _Oliver!_
>   * Alfred Schnittke, _Requiem_ : [Requiem aeternum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OcYNQF_5nU&list=PLxboCpklL6ekxN-rIFAVvdfHhjL8wHppa); [Credo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1TcToU2bO8); [Requiem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip4jF6uX_Iw&index=14&list=PLxboCpklL6ekxN-rIFAVvdfHhjL8wHppa).
> 

> 
> Thank you for allowing my incredibly self-indulgent music taste!
> 
> Happy New Year!
> 
> ETA: The gorgeous gorgeous art in this chapter is credit to Tumblr user [domlerrys](http://domlerrys.tumblr.com), who illustrated the final scene here: [Arthur](http://domlerrys.tumblr.com/post/138046957167/look-mum-im-learning-new-faces-so-i-found-out) and [Eames](http://domlerrys.tumblr.com/post/138117319182/i-cant-really-blame-you-arthur-do-us-all-a). Please go shower them with love!


End file.
